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BRITISH ARTISTS 


WATTS 


Edited by 8, C. KAINES SMITH, M.A. 


BRITISH ARTISTS 


EDITED BY 


S. C. KAINES SMITH, M.A., M.B.E. 


The ‘volumes at present arranged comprise the following, 
here given in (approximately) chronological order. 


Vol. 
I. 


Il. 


III. 


lV. 
V. 


VL. 


XII. 
XIII. 


XIV. 


XV. 


The XVI. Century Painters. 
With a note on the influ- 
ence of Holbein. 


Cornelius Johnson and 


Jamesone, 
Dobson and Walker. With 


a note on the work of Van 
Dyck in England. 


Lely and Kneller. 


J. Riley, Greenhill, J. M 
Wright, and Mary Beale. 


Thornhill, Dand- 
ridge, and 
Hudson, 


Jervas, 
Richardson, 


. Hogarth. 


Richard Wilson and Joseph 
Farington. 


- Reynolds. 
. Gainsborough. 
. Romney. 


Wright of Derby. 


Paul Sandby, Towne, Cozens. 
With a note on the rise of 
water-colour painting. 


B. West, J. S. Copley, and 
G. Stuart. With a note 
on American painting in 
the XVIII. Century. 


Barker of Bath, and the 
Bath Painters. 


Vol. 
XVI. 


XVII. 
XVIII. 
XIX. 
XX. 
XXI. 
XXII. 


XXIII. 
XXIV. 


XXV. 
XXVI. 
XXVII. 


XXVIII. 
XXIX. 
XXX. 
XXXI. 
XXXII. 


XXXIII. 


XXXIV. 
XXXV. 
XXXVI. 


Kauffman, Bartolozzi, 
and Zoffany. Witha 
note on Foreign Mem- 
bers of the Royal 
Academy in 1768, 


Downman and Dance. 
Hoppner. 

Opie and Cosway. 
Raeburn. 

Rowlandson. 

Blake. 

Morland and Ibbetson. 


John (old) Crome. With 
a note on the Norwich 
School. 


Lawrence. 

James Ward. 

Girtin and Bonington. 
Constable. 

Cotman. 

Cox. 

De Wint. 

Copley Fielding. 


Bewick and _ Clarkson 
Stanfield. With a note 
on the Newcastle group, 


Turner. 
Alfred Stevens. 
Watts. 


OTHERS IN PREPARATION. 





Uffizi Gallery 


G. F. WATTS 


(BY HIMSELF) 








BRITISH ARTISTS 


EDITED BY 


S.C. KAINES SMITH, m.a. 


WATTS 
ERNEST iL SHORT 


Author of A History of Sculpture, Introduction 
to World History, etc., etc. 





NEW YORK 


FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS 





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First Published in 1924. 


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FOREWORD 


IF the truth must be told, it was not altogether with 
a light heart that I decided to include an essay on 
G. F. Watts in this series ; for I must confess that 
to me his work was always rather a sealed book. 

I could see that there was in it a magnificent 
confidence in the use of colour, but a somewhat 
severe classical training had led me to be prejudiced 
by certain aberrations of draughtsmanship, and in 
his sculpture by certain eccentricities of modelling, 
of which I had not grasped the personal significance. 

In the following pages Mr. Short has so handled 
his subject as to remove all doubts in my mind of 
the permanent quality of the work of Watts. He 
has made it plain that it means something, and 
what is more, that it means something inseparable 
from, and inevitable in, the nineteenth century. 

Although the treatment of the theme differs 
somewhat from that of other volumes in this series, 
in its general outlines I feel that the departure is not 
only justified, but necessitated by the character of 
the work of which it treats. Although Watts was, 
in intention, as firmly based upon the traditions 
and achievements of his predecessors in his chosen 
art as any painter that one can name at random, 
there is at the same time in him an intentional, 
I had almost said a self-conscious, mysticism, for 
which the history of art afforded him no prototype ; 
and it is perhaps singular that a man whose thoughts 


Vv 


v1 Foreword 


ran upon lines which compelled him to address the 
many rather than the few, should have presented 
to his sympathisers so intensely personal an appeal, 

I am not pretending that even after reading this 
book I can find, personally, all in his work which 
Mr. Short would have me to see, but I can at least 
be conscious that it is there, and that it is my fault 
that I cannot findit. This is as much as to say that 
Mr. Short’s interpretation of Watts is illuminating 
and inspiring, and that it is as much critical and 
analytic as it is sympathetic. Those who “ do not 
like Watts ’”’ will find in it much to urge them to 
reconsideration of their judgment, and thereby to a 
better understanding of the point of view of those 
of their fellow men to whom Watts is not only 
intelligible, but a revelation of him and of themselves 
to their inner understanding. The immense body 
of work produced by the painter, and the lavishness 
with which he placed it at the disposal of his nation, 
make it difficult for any student of English painting 
to plead ignorance of the man or of his gospel, and 
it is to be hoped that in the many public galleries, 
in which his paintings are to be studied, this little 
book may prove to be of the same enlightening 
service to those who stand before the delivery 
of his message as it has been to me. 


Leeds, 1924 S.C. EK. 8, 


CONTENTS 





PAGE 
FOREWORD . ‘ ‘ ‘ . ;: Vv 
PREFACE . : : “ ; Sie Et 


CHAPTER I: BIOGRAPHICAL AND PERSONAL . I 


Il: EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND 
THEIR REACTION . « 32 


a? 


III: StyLE AND SUBJECTS - 66 


” 


a) 


IV: THE QUALITY OF THE ARTIST . 103 
APPENDIX I: LIST oF PICTURES . ° e 143 


ne II: BIBLIOGRAPHY é : ae? 8} 





CON Sy Ga ah Go 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


. SELF-PorRTRAIT oF Watts (Uffizi Gallery) 


Frontisfiece 

Page 

. STUDY FOR ‘‘ ASPIRATION ”’ : = 20 
. THE CourT oF DEATH . ; , APG i 
. SIR GALAHAD ; P : : pape 
. Mammon : ; ; é ; cca 
. ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE ‘ ; ow i>) 
. BUILDING THE ARK ‘ : ‘ . Ioo 
. DEATH THE MESSENGER (Study) ‘ ahah 


7S et Ae by F. Hollyer, 9 Pembroke Square, 
Kensington, W.) 


1x 





PREFACE 


Ir was Walter Crane who said that the painter 
differs in nowise from the labourer; both are but 
workmen moving coloured earth from one place to 
another. This is true; nevertheless, if the act is 
similar, the purpose is markedly different and wit- 
nesses to human values of another and more en- 
during order. The primary joys of art are not for 
those who are content to regard painting or sculpture 
as mystery craits. Rather, they are vouchsafed 
to those who search with the naive joy and high 
seriousness of the child at play. The art of the 
_ world is the picture-book of humanity. Ever and 
again a tome is put upon the shelves of Time, but 
only that it may give place to another volume, in 
which a new generation gives fresh expression to 
the old-time joys and memories. Such a book was 
in the making yesterday, and we are reopening it 
at the pages filled by George Frederic Watts, in 
the belief that they will throw light upon some of 
the major problems of art to-day. 


A Georgian who would debate the problems sug- 
gested by the life-work of Watts must necessarily 
run counter to much in modern criticism. It is 
safe to exchange ideas upon craft, couched in the 
jargon of Chelsea, but the fundamentals of life and 
society, which seemed all important to Watts, are 


xi 


xii Preface 


taboo. Old-fashioned folk who dare the enchanted 
woods of St. John and threaten its flourishing under- 
growth, are faced by many who pride themselves 
upon divorcing art from life and poetry. There are 
artistic careers, whose primary interest lies in 
the ingenuity of the craftsman; not so the life- 
work of Watts. This can only be understood by 
those who will relate the artist to the pulsing life 
and thought of his age. 

This man, who “ painted a queer sort of picture 
about God and Creation,’’ is worth knowing for his 
lovable self, but even more illuminating is the light 
which his life and work shed upon modern painting. 
There were times when a philosophy of art was not 
required, in as much as philosophy and art were one. 
Art was the expression of the All of Knowledge, 
which is true philosophy, as it is among certain 
happy tribes to this day. When the Pueblo Indian 
tells how the sky-god passes across the heavens with 
the blazing shield of the sun’s disc in his hand, and 
vanishes, at last, beyond the portals of the dark 
underworld where the spirits of the dead are at rest, 
he is creating, at once, art, science and religion. 
The faith which furnished driving force to the tale 
as religion also gave it potency as art. To-day, this 
primal faith is too often wanting. The following 
Credo of Watts has a sadly old-fashioned ring :— 


*‘ All beauty is the face of God. Therefore, 
to make acquaintance with beauty, in and through 
every form, is the cultivation of religious feeling. 
This, while it is the noblest aspect of art, is also 


Preface xill 


the most primitive. Nothing can be more im- 
portant to remember than that, in the cultiva- 
tion of the artistic perceptions, we are developing 
one of the essential endowments of the human 
creature—one in which the difference between 
him and the lower creation is most distinctly 
marked. It seems to me to be the duty of every- 
one to answer to every such call.” 


The weakening of faith in beauty and the God of 
beauty has had far-reaching consequences. Artists 
have tended to withdraw into their own craft in the 
belief that this might be made all-sufficing. Art for 
Art’s sake has been the cry. If the phrase only 
voiced the artist’s respect for his tools, it would be 
well. Pride in craft, and in the material of a craft 
have made great thinkers and teachers from Phidias 
to Da Vinci and Turner. But the phrase too often 
denotes the artist’s carelessness as to subject matter 
and his contempt for his patrons, the public. If 
the painter demanded no remuneration, if like 
Brabazon, he was content to wait for public recogni- 
tion until seventy, this attitude of mind might be 
justifiable. But we are constantly reminded that 
an artist must live, and even that he requires a 
considerable measure of material comfort; the 
painter or sculptor of to-day is no longer an artisan ; 
he is a professional man ; like the successful lawyer 
or doctor, he would taste occasionally of the good 
things of the world. Well and good. Paying 
commissions, and the good things which paying 
commissions bring, are not to be despised. * But 


XIV Preface 


they are not for the artist who defiantly announces 
that he works for art’s sake alone. Above all, they 
are not for the spurners of the public, who, after all, 
keep the professional man in comfort. 

If the effect of current art theory upon the artist 
has been serious, the effect upon the public has been 
even more deplorable. Men and women stand before 
a picture or a statue, put a pencil mark in their 
shilling catalogues and pass on. They are afraid 
to like; they are afraid to dislike. In other cases 
the effect of the divorce of art from life shews itself 
no less surely in the wrong sort of liking. At times 
the more cultured section of the public make a very 
real effort to understand and even to enjoy art. 
Remembering the prevailing type of criticism, the 
public attempt to take a craftsman’s interest in a 
painting or a statue. Since prettiness stands con- 
demned, ugliness becomes the new criterion. “ Well 
painted ”’ or “‘ well modelled ”’ are the stock phrases 
of appreciation. This is wrong. Craft is not the 
concern of the public. A few hundred people in 
London are competent to give a useful opinion upon 
the technique of a painting ; a few score upon the 
technical qualities of a marble or a bronze statue. 
Even an artist is only a good critic of technique 
within the narrow limits of his own experience. 
From the popular standpoint, the last and only test 
of a great work of art is its vitality—material, mental 
and spiritual. If a picture or a statue bears the 
impress of a personality, if it has a living message, 
it is good. If it is a dead thing, however well 
painted or modelled, the public may safely ignore it, 


Preface XV 


A picture, like poetry, is the blossom and fragrance 
of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human 
passions or emotions; it should bring into relief the 
obscure aspects of Nature; it should recall the 
beautiful things which the soul of man has lost; it 
should embody man’s instinctive premonition of 
beautiful things to come. As Watts knew well, the 
abiding value and function of art is to translate the 
thought of God. Art does this, or it does nothing. 
A basis less sure may satisfy the painter who is 
content with the applause of his particular claque, 
but it will assuredly be valueless to everyone else. 
The recovery of an ideal basis for art is essential to 
counteract the regard for realistic representation 
which is crowding the galleries of the twentieth 
century with landscapes which reveal everything 
except the God of Nature, and portraits which would 
be life-like if only a soul were shining from within. 
Upon such a foundation, however, it is possible to 
formulate a philosophy of art which is fully satisfying, 
and establish a real relation between art and the 
unthinking, uncritical majority known as the 
public. | 

The interest and significance of George Frederic 
Watts arise from the fact that he is the latest of 
Britain’s poet-painters. In deed and word, his aim 
was ever to identify his work with ‘ all that is good 
and great in every creed and utterance, and with all 
that is inspiring in every record of heroism, of 
suffering, of effort and of achievement.’ Born in 
1817 and dying in 1904 at eighty-seven, Watts lived 
through the age when the blast furnace, the 


XV1 Preface 


macadamized road, the locomotive and the steam- 
ship were bringing modern democracy into being. 
He was fourteen when Orator Hunt lifted the tri- 
colour in South London and raised the cry, “‘ For 
the West End.’’ Then came the Reform Bill. 
First the lower middle class of Charles Dickens, to 
which Watts himself belonged, were aroused ; later 
came the opportunity of the masses in the large 
towns. ‘“‘ They lifted up their heads towards the 
sky. They filled their lungs with vital air. They 
lived.” 

As Watts watched the growth of democracy, he 
saw the individual come within the grip of Mammon. 
In an earlier age a man had been a craftsman with 
the joys and interests of a craftsman. Watts saw 
him become a cog in the wheel of a vast social 
machine. In 1859, when the painter was forty- 
two, a pair of boots were made by eighty-three 
operations, the work of two men. To-day, they 
are made by 120 operations performed by 113 men 
and women. Seventy years ago there were shoe- 
makers; to-day, there are vamp cutters, tip- 
makers, second-row stitchers, counter buffers and 
the rest. Efficiency has become the new idol, our 
idol. Is it strange that Alfred Gilbert, an artist 
and a lover of the beautiful to his heart’s core, 
said :— 


“* All over the world joy in beauty as an instinct 
is coming to an end, crushed by the wheels. of 
machinery and forgotten in the competition for 
wealth, There was a time when temple, dwelling 





Preface xvii 


house or workshop gave to any surroundings, 
however beautiful, the additional beauty of 
human interest; now our factories, our villas 
and our cottages are sores upon the face of 
Nature.” 


Watts himself believed that environed by 
mechanical work and trusting to machinery, the 
majority of men had almost lost their powers of 
observation. Standing in opposition to the sense 
of beauty, form and arrangement, he regarded 
machinery as a deadly foe to art. ‘‘ The rudest 
handwork is never without unconscious beauty, 
never without a something that belongs to life.’’ 
Following such men as Watts and Gilbert, it is not 
strange that many lovers of art have come to doubt 
if painting or sculpture can longer give vital form 
to the thoughts that are uppermost in thé world 
to-day. Symonds used the fine image of the meteor 
becoming luminous when it strikes upon the grosser 
elements of the terrestrial sphere, suggesting that 
the thoughts that art employs must needs immerse 
themselves in the grosser atmosphere of sensuous- 
ness before they are of value—for art. In a super- 
refined and complex civilisation, the creative 
impulses that make for art are apt to be replaced 
by the spirit of investigation and criticism. The | 
modern scholar insists that the beauty of Helen 
was not the cause of the Trojan war, but rather 
the blackmail levied by Priam on the Greek com- 
merce in the Hellespont. Not only the past but 
the passing worlds of nature and humanity present 

B 


xviii Preface 


themselves in a wholly new aspect. We see more, 
much more, but, above all, we see in a new per- 
spective. Says Pater, “to regard all things, all 
principles of things, as inconstant modes or fashions 
has more and more become the tendency of modern 
thought.” Edward Caird, regarding the problem 
from the material standpoint, wrote :—‘“‘ It is the 
particular strength of the modern time that it has 
reached a clear perception of the finite world as 
finite ; that in science it is positive, ie. that it 
takes particular facts for no more than they are ; 
and that in practice it is unembarrassed by super- 
stition—i.e.by the tendency to treat particular things 
and persons as mysteriously sacred. The first 
immediate awe and reverence which arose out of 
the confusion of the divine with the human, the 
ideal with the real, has passed away from the 
world.” The artist and the poet, indeed, Caird 
continued, still keep up the confusion. It is their 
work to give 


“To one brief moment caught from fleeting time 
The appropriate calm of blest eternity.” 


Nothing can be said against the analyst of modern 
experience who distinguishes carefully and accur- 
ately between the finite and the infinite in the 
All of Knowledge. But what of the artist who 
forgets that his job in the work-a-day world is to 
recover, if only for a moment, the calm of blest 
eternity ? The shattering of old-time beliefs has 
robbed not a few of the faith upon which every 
art effort of abiding worth has been raised. This 





Preface xix 


in turn, has led to the abandonment of accepted 
canons of craft, so that a new craft is being evolved 
to express the emotional outpourings of the age 
of machinery and science. Many pictures are the 
manifest outcome of their maker’s obsession with 
paint, rather than with life. Thought and feeling 
are sacrificed to a rendering of tone values. From 
Monet, our young men learnt to read Helmholtz 
on Physiological Optics and the result has been a 
reaction, not only against Academic “‘ finish ’’? and 
colour, but against subject matter in pictures at all. 
The New English Art Club is a centre where the 
professors of the science of paint loom largely. 
Fearful of the passions which run riot at the 
Academy and the Salons, members of the New 
English Art Club pride themselves upon their low 
spirits. Their annual exhibition has been described 
as a parade of pictorial sackcloth and ashes. The 
exhibitors explain that the treatment of blacks 
and greys calls for a more subtle colour sense than 
the treatment of brilliant colours, a statement 
which is often justified by paintings shewing a 
subtle treatment of neutral tones. To be just, 
many of them paint certain aspects of Nature 
faithfully ; the ever changing sun-garment of day- 
light and the grey shroud of evening are pictured 
and pictured well; but imagination and poetry, 
the things which make the craftsman an artist, 
are sacrificed for the sake of carrying the science 
of the rendering of light and tones a little further. 

In Paris and elsewhere on the Continent the 
science of painting is held to justify even wilder 


xx Preface 


experiments. The Mosaic painters, under the 
leadership of M. Signac, cover their canvases with 
spots of primary colours violently contrasted, with 
the object of representing the full glitter of sunlight. 
The Geometrists divide up form as the Mosaic 
painters divide up tone, their theory being that 
there are geometrical masses latent in all real 
objects. Certain pictures exhibited in a notorious 
collection at the Grafton Galleries some years 
ago (I hesitate to decide whether they were 
portraits or landscapes), will be remembered. The 
painters provided the puzzle-pieces from which the 
visitor was required to construct his own Nature 
and his own humanity. The Cubists took the 
liberty ‘‘to move round the object painted, in 
order to give thereof a concrete representation 
composed of several successive aspects,”’ the result 
being a series of solid cubes, generally grey or 
brown, piled one upon another as though they were 
children’s bricks. Post Impressionism is the end 
of an art which banishes romance and takes its 
stand upon science alone. With justice the pictures 
of the Post Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries 
in 1912 and similar exhibitions which followed when 
it was found there was money in such follies, were 
described as the handiwork of the Goths and Huns 
of art whose frenzy took the form of diabolical 
mockery, and who were content, if only they could 
smash what Watts, in describing an exhibition by 
the ultra-moderns of his own day, called “ the 
righteousness of beauty, which belongs to the 
bird’s song and the movement of the clouds.” 


Preface xxi 


There are those who hold that the black destruc- 
tion of Post Impressionism and allied cults is 
necessary if a new beauty is to arise. They look 
for a man of genius who will build upon the waste 
revealed after the Cubist destroying angel has 
breathed upon the world. But surely the function 
of art is not to create another Universe, but to 
translate the thoughts of God implicit in the world 
in which we have our being. Art is a bringing into 
relief of the obscure thought of Nature, as we may 
know it here and now. Only those who despise life 
and despise living will desire a shattering of the 
old belief in beauty and the old-time expression of 
this beauty by honest craftsmanship. Rightly 
interpreted, the revelation of Darwin—the concep- 
tion of a dynamic as opposed to a static origin of 
things—is as godlike as the opening chapter of 
““ Genesis.”” In the past every fresh conception of 
the universe has manifested itself in an art based 
upon beauty and honest labour. The present will 
not prove different. At the moment humanity is 
stunned by the bewildering flood of new facts and 
fresh hypotheses, but an artist-seer will yet arise 
with the insight and courage to lay bare once more 
the beating heart of things, to establish a harmony 
between man and the All of Things, a harmony 
which comes from the time when man and God 
were one. 

Certain problems of the post-war world are not 
those of the nineteenth century, but one question 
which troubled the clear sou] of Watts remains. 
We would still see nature and humanity as they 


XXii Preface 


appear to the all-seeing eye of the Shaper of Things. 
Never ashamed to own to an ethical or religious 
purpose, it was this very idea of art with a mission 
which gave to Watts’s life’s work an element of 
timelessness, which inspired reverence even when 
it did not strike deep down into the public imagina- 
tion. If the history of 19th century art had to 
be written around a single personality, as the 
history of the Elizabethan age might be written 
around Shakespeare, no more significant figure 
could be chosen than George Frederic Watts. 
He stood sufficiently apart from his age to escape 
the ephemeral. Yet the best thought and endeavour 
of his time sound through his work like a dominant 
theme, giving it unity and a fuller meaning. Watts 
refused to content himself with imitating the 
surface of things; feeling that art had an end more 
sure than the satisfaction of sensuous instincts, he 
was not ashamed to own to an ethical or religious 
purpose. As he said :— 


““ My intention has not been so much to paint 
pictures that will charm the eye as to suggest 
great thoughts that will appeal to the imagination 
and the heart, and kindle all that is best and 
noblest in humanity—I teach great truths but 
I do not dogmatise. On the contrary, I purposely 
avoid all references to creeds and appeal to men 
of all ages and every faith. I lead them to the 
church door and then they can go in and see 
God in their own way.” 


Preface xxiii 


Or again :— 


“* My aim as an artist was to be as a conscience 
to my native land, to the world. The object in 
my work has been to suggest, in the language 
of art, modern thought in things ethical and 
spiritual. I want to make art the servant of 
religion by stimulating thought, high and noble.” 


Such ideals had a recognised place in the 
Victorian scheme of things, however strange they 
may sound to-day. Those who urge they still 
have power to heal and arm and plenish and sustain 
will be told that their theories are but a revival of 
the discredited ‘“‘ heresy of the didactic,’’ that they 
are no more than a recrudescence of Taine’s “ art 
for utility’s sake.’”’ Be that as it may, if for 
“utility ’’ we substitute ‘‘ humanity,” a standpoint 
is afforded from which the main circumstances in 
Watts’s career may be viewed. He said, “‘ What 
Michelangelo did for theology in the Sistine 
chapel, it has been my object for long years to do 
for humanitarianism.”’ ‘‘ Art for humanity’s sake ”’ 
includes both the artist and those to whom he 
appeals and has a spiritual aspiration which is 
absent from the word utility. The phrase, there- 
fore, shall serve as our touchstone for judging our 
artist’s life and work. In so far as humanity 
listened and understood, George Frederic Watts 
will be justified. 





CHAPTER I. 


BIOGRAPHICAL AND PERSONAL. 


LONDONER by birth, Watts was born 

in Queen Street, Bryanston Square, on 
February 23, 1817. He was brought upin a 
home where Puritan influences were dominant 
and, like Ruskin, had to emancipate himself 
from the intellectual narrowness of the creed. 
For many years, the boy associated every 
Sunday with a preacher in a black gown who 
told of the wrath to come. One of the stories 
which made most impression upon his early 
imagination concerned a man who neglected 
to read his Bible on week-days. Taking the 
book from his shelf one Sunday, the man 
was struck dead. From childhood, too, 
Watts was delicate. Violent headaches often 
left him helpless for days. As a youth he 

I 


2 Biographical and Personal 


was liable to these prostrating attacks 
almost every week. Mrs. Watts, his mother, 
also an invalid, was a widow of about thirty 
years of age when she married. George Watts 
Senior was a man of some culture and 
considerable ambition and a maker of 
musical instruments by profession. There is 
a portrait of him, from his son’s brush, 
painted in 1836, suggesting the dreamer who 
missed actual accomplishment. George 
Frederic was the eldest son and the only 
surviving child of the marriage. After his 
mother’s death from consumption in 1826, 
the boy was brought up by his step-sisters. 
Ill-health prevented Watts attending school 
regularly, but he early became a reader and 
soon mastered the few books in his father’s 
house. In particular, he read, re-read and 
read again Homer’s Iliad. Scott’s novels 
were other favourites. On Sunday, the 


family reading was confined to the Bible and 


Boyhood 3 


“ Pilgrim’s Progress.” Able to use a pencil 
from earliest childhood, the boy frequently 
copied the pictures from the family 
Bible. 

As has been said, Watts’s first home was in 
Queen Street, Bryanston Square, near the 
Marble Arch and to the east of Edgware 
Road. After his mother’s death, when the 
boy was nine, the family moved to Star 
Street, Marylebone. Later they lived in 
Roberts Road, Hampstead Road. At that 
time there were still fields with flowers 
that fed the imagination of the young artist. 
Watts was a Cockney as Keats, Blake and 
Turner were Cockneys, but Cockneys of a 
city which was still in touch with country 
sights and sounds. Always George Watts 
had a love for birds. He tamed a sparrow so 
that it perched on his head as he lay in bed, 
and ate from his plate; he never forgot the 


sorrow of its death. In shutting up his pet 


4 Biographical and Personal 


for the night, the boy accidentally caught the 
little head in the doorway. Unseen it had 
popped out for a last “‘good-bye.’’ The pathos 
of the outstretched wing in The Wounded 
Heron, which was hung in the Academy of 
1837, recalls the experience. Years later 
Watts painted The Shuddering Angel, in 
which he made his protest against the wanton 
waste of bird life for the adornment of women, 
and, still worse, the serving of skylarks and 
other song birds as gastronomic delicacies at ~ 
city banquets and restaurants. As Ralph 


Hodgson sang :— 


I saw with open eyes 
Singing birds sweet 
Sold in the shops 

For the people to eat, 
Sold in the shops of 
Stupidity Street. 


Watts’s earliest known pencil drawing is 
a Sisyphus, made, perhaps, at the age of 


seven. At eleven he could make an exact 


The Young Artist 5 


copy of an etching, ‘ counting every line and 
sharpening the chalk between every three or 
~four strokes,” as he recalled in later years, 
A copy of an etching by J. H. Mortimer, 
reproduced alongside the original in Mrs. 
Watts’s “ Life,” fully justifies the claim. This 
chalk drawing dates from 1831, when Watts 
was thirteen. Very early he drifted into the 
company of artists. William Behnes, Sculptor 
in Ordinary to Queen Victoria, lived in the 
Watts’s house and was an early friend of the 
family. An even more direct intellectual 
influence was Charles, a crippled brother of 
William Behnes. A friend of Charles Behnes, 
a miniature painter, gave Watts his first 
lesson in the use of oil colour. The copy of 
a picture by Sir Peter Lely, dating from this 
time, can be seen at Compton, Surrey. 

These proofs of technical skill persuaded 
Mr. George Watts to take a selection of his 
boy’s drawings to Sir Martin Archer Shee, 


6 Biographical and Personal 


then President of the Royal Academy. Sir 
Martin’s verdict was “I can see no reason 
why your son should take up the profession 
of art.’”’ Mr. Watts, however, disregarded 
the implied advice and George Frederic went 
on with his studies. By sixteen, he could 
undertake small portrait commissions, some- 
times in pencil, and sometimes in coloured 
chalks, receiving 5s. apiece for the drawings. 
In 1835, he attended the Academy Antique 
School for a few weeks but soon decided that 
the teaching there could do him no good. 
Two years later he exhibited his first work 
at the Academy Summer Exhibition, The 
Wounded Heron. 

Among Watts’s early patrons none was 
more generous than Mr. Constantine lonides, 
a wealthy Greek merchant in the City of 
London, whose flair for the good things in art 
was transmitted to his sons and has found 


tangible expression in the Ionides Collection, 


Early Patrons 7 


bequeathed to the Victoria and Albert 
Museum by Mr. C. A. Ionides. Watts 
painted several members of the [Ionides 
family in the late ’thirties and early ’forties, 
including a group with Mr. Luke Ionides, 
as a small boy in Greek costume. In 1839, 
Watts painted a portrait which he sold for 
£20. The purchaser sent £25. With charac- 
teristic scrupulousness, Watts insisted upon 
throwing in a portrait of the baby. 

The painter has told us the secret of these 
early professional successes. He was deter- 
mined to do the very best possible ; he had 
no hopes of making a name; nor did he 
think much about climbing to the top of the 
tree ; he merely set himself to do the utmost 
he could, and, added the painter “I think 
I may say I have never relaxed.”’ He trained 
himself to rise with the sun. There were 
difficulties at first, but he overcame them by 


not going tobedatall. Instead of undressing 


8 Biographical and Personal 


Watts rolled himself in a thick dressing-gown 
and lay on the floor of his studio, sometimes 
on two chairs, until he had taught himself to 
get up with the sun. Once gained, the habit 
was fixed for life. At 88 Watts still rose at 
dawn. When he was ill and obliged to 
remain in bed he asked to have the curtains 
and blinds closed, explaining, “1 cannot 
- bear it, the light calls to me.” 

If the story of Watts’s life tells much of 
toil, there is no less about the joy of effort. 
““ How happy we are to have work at which 
we can worship all the time.” But it was the 
necessity for constant effort which Watts 
never tired of recalling, not only by his 
example but in his table talk: “ The artist 
must bring to his work the ardour of the 
young lover or the missionary. If he is 
satisfied with a few hours’ hard work—no 
matter how hard—and can throw thought 


of it aside and say he has done enough for 


Greek Influences 9 


the day; not for him will be a place on the 
highest level for all time.” 

““ Remember the daisies,’ he once said. 

Throughout his ’prentice-years Watts 
maintained his interest in books. After a 
day’s work he used to go to the studio in 
Osnaburgh Street (it was later occupied by 
Lord Leighton and Sir Thomas Brock) to 
talk with Charles Behnes upon Shakespeare, 
Virgil, Ossian and the well-loved Homer. 
He read the Iliad and the Odyssey until 
the gods and heroes became his familiar 
friends. 

In the ‘thirties the Elgin marbles were 
less understood than they are now. After 
an enquiry by a select Committee of the 
House of Commons they were purchased 
by the State in 1816. The collection con- 
sisted of sculptures and architectural frag- 
ments from the Parthenon, the Erectheion 


and other Athenian buildings; casts from 
C 


age) Biographical and Personal 


the Parthenon, the Theseion and the Monu- 
ment of Lysicrates; a large number of 
Greek reliefs and many drawings and plans. 
Earlier still the British Museum had acquired 
the Towneley marbles and a few years later 
the bronzes and portrait busts collected by 
Richard Payne Knight. When Watts was 
a student the national collection of Greek 
sculpture was not materially different from 
that of to-day. Until 1847 the marbles were 
shown in a special wing at Montague House. 
It was here that the youthful Watts came 
to understand the fervour of the Greeks’ 
search for physical beauty and their ever- 
present determination to make art uphold a 
strenuous moral ideal, an ideal based in no 
small measure upon the harmony, fitness, 
and proportion which they embodied in their 
art. From the Elgin marbles he also learnt 
that the human form itself is an entire 


medium of spiritual expression and that 


~~“ Caractacus’”’ II 


human thoughts must take human form if 


they are to make their due appeal. . 
When twenty-five years of age Watts came 


under the influence of the second great effort 
in Western art, namely the art of medieval 
Italy. In 1842, the commissioners in charge 
of the decoration of the newly-built Parlia- 
ment House advertised a competition for 
decorative cartoons, not less than ten or more 
than fifteen feet long, to be made in chalk or 
charcoal without colour, the subjects being 
drawn from English history, or such poets 
as Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. In 
June, 1843, 140 cartoons were exhibited in 
Westminster Hall. To his great surprise 
Watts secured one of the three first prizes, 
with a design picturing Caractacus led in 
triumph through the streets of Rome. Three 
fragments of the cartoon have been preserved 
and were presented to the Victoria and 
Albert Museum by Lord Northbourne. The 


12 Biographical and Personal 


other winners of first prizes were Edward 
Armitage and Charles West Cope. Carac- 
tacus never went beyond the cartoon stage 
and even this was so damaged by some 
process of steaming, which the designer 
thought would “fix” the drawing, that 
Watts had serious doubt about entering it 
for the competition. The abiding good 
which came from Watts’s success was his 
first Italian tour. In the end this occupied 
the years 1843 to 1847, and resulted in the 
meeting with Lord and Lady Holland which 
was to have such decisive consequences upon 
Watts’s career. After spending a few months 
in France with Edward Armitage, Watts 
went on to Italy, where he was introduced to 
Lord Holland, then British Minister at 
the Grand Ducal Court in Florence. For 
three years Watts lived with Lord and Lady 
Holland, meeting the minister’s friends and 


travelling with his patron through the various 


Life in Florence 13 


art centres. In Florence, Watts painted 
the vast picture from the “ Decameron,” 
once in the Cosmopolitan Club, now in the 
Tate Gallery. As to material success, no 
young artist could have desired a better 
introduction to his profession. In 1846, 
writing from Lord Holland’s Medicean villa 


at Careggi to Mr. Ionides, his earliest patron, 
Watts said: 


“Tf I have not made money, it has been my own 
fault. With the connection I have made, if I 
applied myself to portrait painting, I might carry 
all before me; but it has always been my ambition 
to tread in the steps of the old masters, and to 
endeavour, as far as my poor talents would permit, 
to emulate their greatness. Nor has the sight of 
their great works diminished my ardour; this 
cannot be done by painting portraits. Cannot you 
give me a commission to paint a picture to send to 
Greece? ... Take advantage of my enthusiasm 
now ; I will paint you an acre of canvas for little 
more than the cost of the material.”’ 


The individualistic influences in Florentine 
art did not affect Watts ina marked degree ; 


14 - Butographical and Personal 


he learnt more from the Venetian painters, 
than from the Florentines, Michelangelo 
excepted. In Venice, a system of civic rule 
scarcely less dominating than that in Athens 
kept the individual in check; the Venetian 
artist was forced to express the communal 
ideals of his City-state ; an influence which 
tended to strengthen the predisposition 
Watts had acquired from the Parthenon 
marbles and from those hours in the 
Osnaburgh Street studio under the spell of 
Homer. Letters exchanged with Ruskin in 
the early ’sixties suggest that Watts was, 
at that time, an earnest student of Titian’s 
methods. Not that there was direct copying, 
but the young Englishman discovered a 
certain kinship in spirit which, for a time, 
made him see with the eyes of the great 
Venetians. He said: “ If I could carry out 
my own feeling perfectly, my picture would 


be solemn and monumental in character, 


Influence of Venice 15 


noble and beautiful in form and rich in 
colour ; but the subtle varieties of sunlight 
I should never aim at producing. I can see 
in Nature what Turner saw, and can appre- 
ciate the excellence of his imitation, but my 
natural tendency is to see Nature with such 
eyes as Giorgione and Titian had. I see 
only with their eyes, but do not work with 
their brains or hands. Alas!” 

No less potent than the example of the 
great Venetians was the influence which 
Italy exerted upon Watts through the in- 
toxicating blue of the Florentine or Venetian 
sky. Mr. Clausen has suggested that in all 
Mr. Watts’s pictures, whether it is actually 
expressed in the work or not, the blue of the 
sky is a determining factor, so that there is, 
as it were, reflected back from his pictures 
a sense of harmony with the great elemental 
things of Nature. Watts himself admitted 


that, so far as colour is concerned, every 


16 Biographical and Personal 


great art must have for its religious basis 
sun-worship. In as much as it is by the 
sun’s influence that men live and move and 
have their being, a picture cannot beauti- 
fully suggest life unless it is pervaded (as 
far as material pigment can effect such a 
result) by the sun’s light. During a later 
visit to Italy in 1853, Watts was no less 
conscious that the full representation of the 
glories of an Italian sky were beyond the 
reach of his memory and imagination, though 
at the moment of experiencing its beauty the 
very arcana of Nature seemed revealed. 

It is interesting to recall that the sense of 
visualisation was not strongly developed in 
Watts ; before he set to work upon a picture 
he did not see the design distinctly. First, 
he had a strong impression of the ideas he 
wished to convey ; then he was conscious of a 
certain nobility of outline in keeping with 


the idea; the rest came as he worked out 


The Crafisman 17 


his design on paper or on canvas. In general, 
Watts followed the traditional method 
whereby the design was primarily a matter 
of form rather than the modern method in 
which a picture is regarded as a colour pattern, 
and the aim of the painter is to reveal the 
decorative and emotional qualities of colour. 
Hence the excellence of the black and white 
reproductions of many of his works. For 
Watts, the beautiful line was one which did 
not return quickly into itself, being part of a 
giant .curve. Henri Bergson has given a 
hint regarding the significance of the curve 
in art which allies Watts’s preference with 
his life-long pre-occupation with the per- 
manent, rather than with the evanescent, in 
human experience. For Bergson, curves are 
more graceful than broken lines because, 
while a curved line changes its direction at 
every moment, every new direction is indi- 


cated in the preceding one. So _ the 


18 Biographical and Personal 


perception of ease in motion passes over into 
the pleasure of holding the future in the 
present. Grace implies ease, and ease sug- 
gests the movement which, in turn, prepares 
the way for further movement. Of Watts’s 
technical treatment of the canvas, Mrs. 
Barrington tells that, before beginning a 
picture, Watts would often paint in some 
body colour; opposed to the tone which he 
intended the finished picture should have. 
Watts dried out the oil from his colours by 
putting them on blotting paper, reducing 
them to the consistency of putty by washing 
them in water. He liked his colours to be 
nearly as dry as pastel. New brushes he 
regarded as useless ; he wore them down to 
little stiff pyramids of hair, shaped like the 
stumps used for chalk drawing. When the 
puttylike pigment was nearly dry, Watts 
would take a paper knife, maybe, and rub 
the touches of colour together; when the 


Little Holland House 19 


surface was quite dry, he would work over 
it yet again in an effort to get a ‘ bloom of 
atmosphere into the painting.’ Watts was 
an ingenious craftsman and playing with 
paint was a continual delight. 

Watts returned from Italy in 1847. Two 
years later he met Mr. and Mrs. Thoby 
Prinsep. Mrs. Prinsep nursed Watts through 
a serious illness in 1850, and, early in the 
following year, he went to live with them 
at Little Holland House, a dower-house of 
Lord Holland’s Kensington mansion. 

“Watts,” said Mrs. Prinsep afterwards, 
“came to stay three days; he stayed thirty 
years,” an amusing, though not precisely 
accurate, description of the household 
arrangements between Watts and the Prinsep 
family. 

The Little Holland House circle provided 
the last outstanding influence of the forma- 


tive years of Watts’s career. Little Holland 


20 Biographical and Personal 


House was an old-fashioned home, set in the _ 
quiet of a farm which made it seem a score 
of.miles from London. A circle of friends 
soon gathered round the Prinseps and Watts, 
including Mrs. Prinsep’s sister, Miss Virginia 
Pattle, afterwards Lady Somers, of whom 
her friends said that her smile lightened a 
room. Tennyson, Rossetti, Burne-Jones 
and Richard Deyle were constant visitors. 
The youthful members of the Prinsep — 
family became an ever-increasing interest 
in Watts’s life. Arthur Prinsep was the 
model for the Siy Galahad and Aspira- 
tion. Val Prinsep, Arthur’s brother, 
became a Royal Academician.. ra 

When the Royal Commission of 1863 
was making its enquiry into the constitution 
and work of the Royal Academy, Watts 
was an important witness and the minutes 
of his evidence throw light upon many 


problems which are still unsolved. Something 











Compton Gallery 
STUDY FOR ‘*‘ASPIRATION’ 


G. F. WATTS 





Royal Academy al 


has been done to remedy the defective 
teaching in the Academy Schools against 
which Watts protested. He urged the 
necessity for studying the living model in 
constant conjunction with the antique, the 
method which has done so much to bring 
students of the human form into contact 
with the verities of sense-impressions and 
_has resulted in the happy naturalism of the 
best modern art, as compared with the 
conventionalism of much mid-Victorian 
painting and sculpture. Watts was insis- 
tent, too, upon the Academy representing 
all branches of artistic endeavour and that 
students should be encouraged to study the 
whole range of art. The man who practised 
one branch of art could not be a really great 
artist. Watts wished the influence of the 
Royal Academy of Arts to show itself in 
street architecture, in furniture, in the 


fashion of dress, and, indeed, in public 


22 Biographical and Personal 


taste in general. In condemnation of 
Academy methods, he recalled that the only 
definite reform movement of his own time, 
the Pre-Raphaelite, had met with opposition 
rather than help from the members of the 
Academy. The painting of wall-pictures 
for the big public schools of our country, 
and the display of art objects in public 
buildings such as railway stations, were 
also discussed with the Commissioners. 
Above all, Watts was insistent upon the 
need, not only for interesting the public, 
but for using the public taste and knowledge 
to counteract the narrowness of a purely 
professional judgment upon art matters 
and production. In 1863, and again in 1879, 
when he wrote an interesting paper upon 
the present condition of art in Britain for 
the ‘‘Nineteenth Century,’”’ Watts was of 
opinion that an Academy Exhibition room 


was no place for a grave, deliberate work 


Grosvenor Gallery 23 


of art. The considerations set out in earlier 
pages would seem to suggest that it is not 
a place for the highest art efforts to-day, 
though much has been done since Watts 
made his protests. Always practical in 
his sympathies, Watts assisted Mr. Hallé 
and Sir Coutts Lindsay to found the 
Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, when Love and 
Death was exhibited. Time, Death and 
Judgment, Mischief, Ophelia, and Su 
Galahad were shewn in the following year. 
The avowed aim of the Grosvenor Gallery 
was to give pictures during their brief 
public life a fair chance of being seen at 
their best. Each group of paintings was 
separate. Each artist delivered his message 
untroubled by conflicting voices. At the 
annual exhibitions of the Grosvenor Gallery, 
and still more when 200 of his works were 
shewn during the winter of 1881-82, Watts 
had an opportunity of making a really 


24 Biographical and Personal 


effective appeal to those whom he sought 
to influence by his art. 

Among Watts’s pictures are two canvases 
which recall a pathetic episode in the lives 
of two great Victorians, The Sisters, and 
the Ophelia exhibited in 1878. The Ophelia, 
surely, is Ellen Terry to the life. 


There is a willow grows aslant a brook, 
That shows its hoar leaves on the glassy stream, 
There with fantastic garlands did she come, 


The Sisters are Kate and Ellen Terry, 
the portrait of the younger girl being very 
lovely. a 

Mrs. Watts’s “‘ Annals of An Artist’s 
Life”’ tell that a beautiful young girl, 
who, with her yet undeveloped genius, was 
destined to fascinate and delight thousands 
of her generation, came into the painter’s 
life, and that the two were married in 


February, 1864, and were parted in June, 


Marriage 25 


1865. Except for a chance meeting in the 
streets of Brighton, George Frederic Watts 
and Ellen Terry never met again. The 
marriage was dissolved in 1877. 

Watts married Miss Mary Fraser-Tytler, 
his second wife, in 1886. A pupil of the 
artist, she was to be the writer of the invalua- 
able ‘ Annals of an Artist,”’ to which every 
student of the painter must be in constant 
debt. 

Mrs. Watts gives more than one glimpse 
of the life at Little Holland House in the 
’sixties and ’seventies. Joachim, bow in 
hand and chin upon the violin, standing 
in the middle of the studio, the art upon the 
walls answering nobly to the music, and 
Hallé at the piano. Mrs. Sartoris (Adelaide 
Kemble), too, and possibly Lady Lilford, 
Mrs. Norton and Lady Somers. Leighton 
was almost always there, and sometimes 


Herschel and Browning, besides politicians, 
D 


26 Biographical and Personal 


statesmen or soldiers, glad to abandon them- 
selves to the joys of the arts in this best of 
homes. 

Not until 1867 was Watts elected an 
associate of the Royal Academy ; in Decem- 
ber of the same year he became a Royal 
Academician, more than twenty years after 
he had definitely embarked upon the life- 
work which now finds its supreme expression 
in the noble room at the Tate Gallery, and 
the equally engaging ‘ Watts’s Room’ at the 
National Portrait Gallery. The final honour 
came when King Edward made the painter 
an original member of the Order of Merit, 
the best reward which the Crown of Britain 
can bestow upon a man of thought or action 
who, through a long life, has served his 
country well. 

Earlier Watts had declined the baronetcy 
which Leighton and Millais accepted, an act 
of modesty which was on a parity with his 


The Last Years 27 


resolve in 1890 no longer to claim his exhibi- 
tion rights as a Royal Academician. Watts 
was then seventy-three, and feared that 
with advancing years there might be some 
declension in powers of craft. He asked, 
therefore, that his work should be judged 
each year on its merits, as though it came 
from a painter outside the ranks of the 
Academy. In fact, Watts continued to 
exhibit for fourteen more years, his last 
work being the charming portrait, Lilian, 
the girl in the garden hat. The pictures of 
the last decade had not the sureness of eye 
and hand of the middle years, but the chief 
difference was psychological. As with 
Tennyson, a sense of fame and a knowledge 
of his ever-growing influence increased the 
painter’s sense of responsibility and tended 
to detract from any lyric tendency there 
may have been in his nature. Always Watts 


had more of the high seriousness of the great 


28 Biographical and Personal 


Victorians than the feeling for lyric rapture 
which characterises other artists. Ever 
mindful of his humble origin, though he 
would gladly have forgotten it, Watts’s 
desire to uplift the masses deepened with the 
years, until the master became the preacher, 
and the preacher the seer. 

Watts’s most mature thought upon life 
present and life to come is to be found in The 
Court of Death, where Death is pictured as 
the Mother of Humanity, summoning her 
children to her at the last. It wasa favourite 
idea of Watts to regard Death as a kindly 
nurse who would say to her children, ‘ And 
now, you must go to bed and you will wake 
in the morning.’ The Court of Death, 
which dominates the Watts Room in the 
Tate Gallery, was designed in the ’sixties 
for the mortuary chapel of a cemetery for 
London paupers. Watts read somewhere of 
a. proposal to build a chapel in order that 





Tate Gallerv 


bee GOURT: OF DEATH 
G. F. WATTS 





“ Court of Death” 29 


the coffins of pauper dead might be collected 
in one place so that a single burial service 
would suffice. The callousness of the proposal 
touched the painter; he set to work to 
consider how such a chapel might be made 
beautiful with poetry, even if it was dis- 
figured by the calculated materialism of 
man. One thought which came to him was 
this picture of the Mother of Life and Death 
—and so the painter became preacher, and 
the preacher seer. 

Enthroned upon the ruins of the world, 
with a child, the germ of human life, in her 
lap, and behind her head the glow of Eternity. 
On either side stand two angel figures— 
Silence and Mystery—guarding the portals 
of the Unknown. At the feet of the Death 
Mother are gathered all conditions of men, 
rendering their last homage to the Queen of 
Things Created. The warrior in the pride 


of strength and manhood, bowing his head, 


30 Biographical and Personal 


renders his sword. The nobleman in crimson 
and ermine cloak lays down his coronet. 
A cripple craves respite from pain ; an aged 
woman seeks release from poverty and 
struggle. On the other side of the throne 
a young girl, wearied with suffering, lays 
her head as though in sleep upon a winding 
sheet, while a little child, half in sport, 
draws the shroud over his head. At the 
feet of Death crouches the lion, a type of 
physical strength. As Watts said—‘ Death 
does not exact but receives homage.’’ Sickness 
‘lays her head upon the knee of Death; 
old age comes for repose ; and, in the arms 
of the silent figure on the throne, is the 
youngest possible child, the very beginning 
of Life being in the lap of Death. 

A short time before his last illness Watts 
said to his wife, “‘ I am glad I painted Death 
with that white robe; it makes it an angel 
and I often catch a glint of that white 


Watts’s Death 31 


garment behind my shoulder and it seems to 
me to say “Iam not far off.’’’ On June 4th, 
1904, he was in the studio for the last time. 
One morning he beckoned Miss Geraldine 
Liddell and Mrs. Watts to come nearer, 
and tried to put into words a vision that had 
come to him. He had looked into the Book 
of Creation and understood that the whole 
could be comprehended. ‘“‘ A glorious state,” 
he called it, and he ended, “‘ Now, I see that 
great Book—I see that great Light.” On 
Friday, the first of July, 1904, he died. 


CHAPTER II. 


EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND THEIR 
REACTION. 


OT only the example of the Greeks — 
and the Venetians, but his personal 
conviction regarding the ultimate purpose 
of art, impelled Watts to the creation of 
works which would speak to his countrymen 
as a whole. He dreamed of paintings which 
would be as truly national as the lyrics the. 
youth of Athens had chanted in chorus 
during the feast of Dionysus, or the frieze 
of the Parthenon itself. 
Above the poverty-stricken strugglers, 
who can do no more than keep body and 
soul together, there is an ever-growing body 


of potential art lovers, who claim no expert 
32 


Art and the Public 33 


knowledge, but welcome the insight which 
a painter-poet can give them into nature, 
life and conduct. These are the public, 
the people, the nation, and they were the 
men and women whom Watts had in mind 
when he returned from Italy in 1847, 
obsessed with a desire to revive and develop 
fresco-painting in England. He failed, and 
it is needful to ask why, as Watts said himself, 
a life which might have been an epic proved 
only a series of sonnets. In part, Watts’s 
failure was due to the fact that he lived in 
an age of ideas and emotions of exceptional 
complexity. Titian had found it easy to 
paint pictures of significance for his country- 
men. He was only required to pass on his 
impression of a few Biblical texts and legends, 
or incidents in the history of his City-State. 
The Venetian spectator knew as much as 
the painter, but Watts had no assurance 


that his public stood in any sort of relation 


34 External Influences 


to his art and were, therefore, in a position 
to understand his philosophy of life and 
conduct. 

Apart from these psychological considera- 
tions there were certain professional circum- 
stances which interfered with the free play 
of Watts’s genius. These were concerned 
with the condition under which his pictures 
were produced and sold, and they have a 
special interest to-day as the poet-painters, 
of our own time suffer even more than Watts 
did from the conditions under which their 
wares are marketed. Watts failed to re- 
establish fresco-painting in Britain, and his 
life-work proved to be fragments rather than 
a unified whole. Might not the result have 
been different had Watts been a Frenchman, 
living in a country where public commissions 
for large decorative paintings and sculptured 
memorials were common? Every year the 


Salons display a number of large canvases 


Public Art in France 35 


destined for Parisian and provincial town- 
halls, or public buildings. Perhaps the 
Basilica of Domrémy, for which M. Boutet 
de Monvel exhibited three Joan of Arc panels 
in a pre-war Salon ; maybe the Petit Palais, 
for which M. Paul Besnard executed four 
great panels, the fourth of which was shewn 
at the Salon in 909. Or again, the Capitol 
at Toulouse, for which M. Henri Martin has 
designed the decorations. The list could 
readily be extended twenty-fold. 

What may be achieved by the French 
system under favourable conditions can be 
judged from the mural paintings of Puvis 
de Chavannes at Amiens, at Marseilles, and 
in the Panthéon, the Sorbonne and the Hétel 
de Ville in Paris. 

Of all the nineteenth century artists, 
perhaps, Puvis de Chavannes bears the 
closest kinship to Watts. Born in 1824, he 
was nearly the same age as the great 


36 External Influences 


Englishman. Like Watts, he was a man of 
high culture. After two prolonged visits to 
Italy he returned to France to be trained as 
an artist. When the studio of Delacroix 
proved as lacking in inspiration to him as the 
Royal Academy was to Watts, de Chavannes 
retired into solitude to work out his problem 
alone. To Gautier, that prince among 
critics, belongs the honour of first seeing in 
the young painter the decorator of palaces 
and of monumental buildings. Gautier said, 
““Puvis de Chavannes is not a painter of 
the ordinary type of picture. He needs 
no easel, but scaffolding and a vast expanse 
of wall.” 

In 1861, when he was thirty-seven years 
of age, Puvis sold his first pictures. They 
were bought by the City of Amiens. The 
sale so overjoyed him that (again how like 
Watts) Puvis insisted upon giving the other 


pictures of the series and even offered two 


Puvis de Chavannes 37 


extra ones to complete the scheme. In 1865, 
Amiens gave de Chavannes a commission 
for the Ave Picardia Nutrix and the Ludus 
pro Patria. To-day, Amiens is remem- 
bered for its Cathedral, the Gothic Parthenon, 
and for the pictures of Puvis de Chavannes. 
In 1867 came a commission for the paintings 
on the staircase of the Museum at Marseilles 
and, in 1874, the order for the decoration of 
the Hdtel de Ville of Poictiers. In 1876, 
Puvis commenced the cycle of pictures 
covering the life of St. Genevieve for the 
Panthéon in Paris. Later came the noble 
painting in the grand amphitheatre at the 
Sorbonne and the series for the Hétel de Ville 
at Paris, the Summer, the Winter and the 
Victor Hugo. 

In one and all we can feel a man of the 
temper of Watts. Some of the sayings of 
de Chavannes, indeed, sound like the table 


talk of his English contemporary. 


38 External Influences 


‘‘ Nature !| they say that I ignore her. But they 
fail to understand that I do not copy Nature! I 
draw my inspiration from her.” 


‘One must try to paint subjects taken from real 
life, but they must have a general application.” 


Or yet again :— 


“Take from Nature everything that is accidental, 
everything that for the moment is ineffective. Art 
completes what Nature only sketched. One makes 
Nature articulate by simplification. Express the 
outstanding facts and leave out therest. This is the 
secret of design and even of eloquence and wit.” 


Puvis de Chavannes was painting the 
story of St. Genevieve at the time of his 
death, his theme being the Old-age of 
St. Genevieve, the patron saint of his well- 
loved city, the sweet influence who had 
banished Paganism from Paris. He shewed 
her stepping from her cell on to the balcony 
of the convent and looking over the sleeping 
city. The moonlight touches the red-tiled 
roofs and the crests of the low hills. But 


dominating all is the figure of Genevieve 


London County Council © 39 


in her white nun’s robe, praying for the 
slumbering town. A dream picture, with 
the misty aloofness of a dream; but also a 
thing which makes it pleasanter for the 
Parisian to pay his rates—and adding poetry 
to an institution which might otherwise be 
regarded as entirely prosaic. 

Is there no English painter who could be 
entrusted with the task of picturing the 
story of London in similar fashion upon the 
walls of the new County Council building 
on the south side of Westminster Bridge? 
Surely there must be, and the search would 
be worth making. The assistants of such 
a man would provide decorative painters 
for the next generation, in as much as they 
would have experience of the common 
training and continuity of effort in which our 
artists are so lacking, as compared with the 
guild craftsmen of the Middle Ages and the 


Renaissance or even with the Parisian 


40 External Influences 


painters of to-day. Students of the 
principal art schools of London, the Royal 
Academy, the Slade, the Royal College of 
Art at Kensington, and the Westminster 
School of Art, were actually approached 
and certain mural decorations were prepared 
with the approval of Mr. Charles Sims, 
Professor Rothenstein, Mr. Walter Bayes 
and Professor Tonks. Eight students who 
were paid no more than £20 apiece submitted 
panels to the London County Council, but 
their work was rejected, to their great 
discouragement. The experience of Watts, 
however, suggests the appointment of a 
master-decorator, versed in the three arts, 
and endowed with the needful vision of 
civic achievement and ideals: It would 
be useless to give such a commission to an 
elderly man, in whom the capacity for 
experiment is dead; such tasks are for the 


mature craftsman, with his spiritual message 


Lincoln’s Inn Hall AI 


strong upon him. Looking back one can 
only regret that Watts did not have the 
opportunities vouchsafed to Puvis de 
Chavannes. With his ideals and his per- 
suasive personality, he might in the course 
of his long life have established an English 
school of mural decorators. As it was Watts 
had practically no pupils. The tradition 
which he painfully won from the Parthenon 
marbles and the paintings of Titian, Tinto- 
retto and Veronese lives only in his gallery 
canvases. 

Yet all public commissions were not 
denied to the Englishman. The Carac- 
tacus, designed for the Houses of Parlia- 
ment, has been mentioned. In 1856 Watts 
spent a holiday at Halicarnassus, assisting 
Sir Charles Newton in the excavations of the 
Mausoleum. On his return he completed 
the great fresco in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, forty 


feet by forty-five feet, a work which had 
E 


42 External Influences 


been commenced in June 1852. The subject 
was Justice—A Hemicycle of Law-givers; 
the scheme owed much to the influence of 
Raphael’s wall-paintings in the Stanze at 
the Vatican, in particular to the School of 
Athens. 

The painter placed Moses in the central 
place, with uplifted head in token that the 
great artist, who took a poor shepherd stock 
and created therefrom a people, was a 
practical mystic, who received his orders 
direct from Heaven. The Justice is one 
of the largest works in fresco in England 
and the most important decorative work by 
the painter which remains. It has been 
restored in recent years and is in fair 
preservation. 

Perhaps the picture which best suggests » 
the potentialities of Watts in early man- 
hood, when the desire to paint big decorative 


canvases was strong upon him, is the Séory 


“ Story from Boccaccio ”’ 43 


from Boccaccio, which has already been 
mentioned as owing its origin to the painter’s 
stay in Florence. It suggests why Ruskin 
described Watts as the only real painter 
of history and thought in England in the 
‘forties. The canvas is about eleven feet 
by thirty and occupies a great part of the 
long wall in the large sculpture room at 
the Tate Gallery. The theme is taken 
from the fifth day of Boccaccio’s entertain- 
ment and illustrates Philomena’s tale of 
the love of Anastasio. Says Boccaccio, 
on a sudden the lover saw come out of a 
thicket full of briars and thorns, and run 
toward him, a most beautiful lady, naked, 
with her flesh rent by the bushes, while in 
close pursuit were two fierce mastiffs, biting 
and tearing where they could. Behind, 
upon a black steed, rode a gloomy knight, 
with a dagger in his hand, who loaded the 


unfortunate woman with the bitterest curses, 


44 External Influences 


Philomena’s tale narrates how Anastasio 
restaged this grim vision for the edification 
of his cruel mistress, so that the fate of the 
miserable woman of the dream so worked 
upon his lady-love that she assented to a 
marriage. Watts pictures Anastasio in the 
centre of a group of young Florentines, his 
lady-love being in the centre. On the right 
is the reincarnation of the dreadful day 
vision, with the rider on the black horse in 
pursuit of his false mistress, who flies in her 
nakedness from the hounds. The vigour 
of the drawing and the variety of pose in 
the frightened spectators of the vision, 
together with the characterisation of the 
chief actors in the tale, Anastasio and his 
disdainful mistress, make the Story from 
Boccaccio pictorial story-telling and decora- 
tion of a high order. 

It is characteristic of Watts that he offered 


to paint the great fresco at Lincoln’s Inn 


Gifts to the Nation 45 


without fee or reward, only stipulating 
that the cost of colours and scaffolding 
should be covered. The refusal to put a 
price upon his work was no exceptional act 
of generosity on Watts’s part. It was 
characteristic of his attitude in regard to 
all his ideal work. In 1887, when he was 
asked by Sir William Agnew to sell Love 
and Death to Manchester, he agreed, but, 


6e 


later, wrote that “‘as a sign of being in 
fellowship with the movement you and 
your colleagues are instituting in Manchester, 
the picture you desire to possess shall be 
placed in your hands as a gift.” Again, in 
1898, when he commenced his bronze statue 
of Tennyson for the Cathedral Close at 
Lincoln, Watts refused to accept more than 
the bare cost of casting, though he had to 
buy a farm-house in which to model so 
large a work. The Tennyson was com- 


pleted in 1903, the central idea being the 


46 External Influences 


poet’s love of nature. Tennyson is ponder- 
ing over the root and stem of a little plant. 
“ It is the lesson of the flower in the crannied 
wall repeated,’’ said Watts. In echoing 
the Laureate’s poem in bronze, Watts felt 
that he was doing public service ; his reward 
was to be a measure of public understand- 
ing. When Watts painted his second version 
of Hope now at the Tate Gallery, though 
his purse had been drained by a long illness, 
he refused £2,000 for the picture, preferring 
it should be a gift to the nation, just as he 
had refused payment for Love and Death 
a year before. Equally characteristic was 
the gift of the Galahad to Eton College. 
Mr. Luxmoore had seen a small version 
belonging to Sir Alexander Henderson which 
was painted in 1862, and realized the worth 
of its message for the youth of Britain. 
He wrote to Watts on the subject and the 
painter replied. Fifteen years later Mr. 





Eton College & Tate Gallery 
SIR GALAHAD 


G. F. WATTS 





‘ é e : eee 
hah ic A Be Fae i eo en a eee 


“ Galahad” 47 


Luxmoore wrote again. This time Watts 
sought out the original sketch and set to 
work upon a new picture which was placed 
in Eton Chapel on June 4th, 1897. Itshows 
the young knight standing bareheaded by 
the side of his white horse in the solitude 
of the forest, and gazing with rapt eyes on 
the Holy Grail. I have known a mother 
give a copy of the Galahad to her boy 
at his Confirmation; it is easy to imagine 
the happy smile of Watts, had he heard that 
his vision was bearing its message far beyond 
the bounds of the school for which he made 
it. 

Watts’s Galahad and Bertram Mackennal’s 
Eton War Memorial,—the nude youth with 
arms outstretched, offering himself to his 
country without reserve,—a bronze which 
Lord Harcourt named “Take Me” 
—show that the alliance of physical and 


spiritual beauty still has power to move 


48 External Influences 


those who are near enough to childhood to 
escape the dazzle and rattle which so many 
of us mistake for life. Akin to the gift of 
the Galahad was Watts’s suggestion that 
frescoes should be painted on the walls 
of the classrooms in the great public schools 
during the summer holidays and be there 
with their messages of great truths and 
noble deeds when the scholars returned to 
work. As Watts visioned the purpose of 
art such pictures would have had an educa- 
tional value as real as any that come from 
the more familiar books. 

The gift of the Hope and the Galahad 
belong to a time when Watts had tasted 
the fruit of financial success, but his custom 
was much the same earlier in his career. 
In 1847, when the nation purchased his 
Alfred, Watts put the very low price of 
£200 upon it, hoping that his action would 


enable the Royal Commission to extend to 


Euston Station 49 


other artists the honour and advantage of 
having their work purchased by the nation. 
The Alfred now hangs in a Committee room 
in the House of Lords. A few years later 
Watts offered to decorate the great Hall at 
Euston Station with a series of mural decora- 
tions, asking no more than actual out of 
pocket expenses for scaffolding, colours and 
the like. If Watts had had the rugged 
impetuosity of Tintoretto he would, doubtless, 
have painted and placed the pictures in posi- 
tion first and asked permission afterwards. 
Euston Station might then have become 
more than a railway station, as the Scuola of 
San Rocco at Venice is more than a deserted 
guild-house. The directors of the L. & N.W. 
Railway did not realize what was being 
offered. Perhaps they really feared the 
fate which their architect predicted, that he 
and the directors alike would be stoned by 


agitated shareholders if Euston Station was 


50 External Influences 


made a thing of beauty and a joy for ever, 
though the cost represented no more than 
paint and scaffolding. At any rate, the 
directors’ reply was a definite “ No.” 
These paintings, designed to minister to 
what their maker conceived to be the mental 
and spiritual needs of his countrymen, bring 
us once more to the influences noted in the 
opening pages of this study. Watts lived 
and worked through the century which saw 
the rise of modern democracy. Few artists 
have less claim than Watts to be called “ the 
painter of British democracy.’ Indeed, to 
the present, there has been no Millet and no 
Meunier in England. The people of the 
Middle Ages built the communal cathedrals, 
but the Gothic art of to-day, an art made by 
the people and embodying the thought and 
belief of the people, has yet to arise. When 
such an art arises, with its humour, its 


uncalculating exuberance of emotion and its 


Growth of Democracy 51 


indifference to academic craft, it will be very 
different from the stoic visions of Watts. 
Nevertheless, the body of thought which 
Watts expressed arose directly from ideas 
astir in his age. Without sympathy with 
the problems raised by industrialism and 
the growth of great cities, a very different 
personality would speak in that quiet hall 
in the Tate Gallery. 

After the first triumph of democracy at 
the time of the 1832 Reform Bill, Britain 
resigned itself to the direction of a small body 
of capitalists, working upon a theory of 
competitive contract. The theory was too 
frigid and calculating to inspire a vital art. 
It may have been responsible for Frith’s 
Derby Day and The Railway Station, but 
little more. The Reform Act marked the 
transition from a monarchical and feudal 
system to an industrial system in which the 


suffrages of the many were to have a new 


52 External Influences 


importance, but it did not bring about the 
habits of mind which are most closely con- 
nected with an appreciation of the beautiful 
in nature and the significant in art. Instead, 
man was conceived as a reasonable creature, 
seeking his own happiness, and from this 
social philosophers deduced the proposition 
that government by the majority would 
result in the happiness of the majority. A 
political ideal arose which was summed up 
in the phrase, ‘ the greatest happiness of the 
greatest number.’ Men were thus led to the 
belief that if a country became richer it must 
become happier. They scoffed when Ruskin 
asked what was the good of a train from 
Islington to Camberwell which only took a 
man from a dismal and illiberal life in Isling- 
ton to an equally dismal and illiberal life in 
Camberwell, just as they scoffed a generation 
later when Tolstoi cried “what men aim at 


in life is not to do what they think good, but 


Victorian Age 53 


to call as many things as possible “ mine.” ’ 
So far as the direct effect of Victorian politics 
upon art and thought were concerned, the 
end was the philistinism of the ’seventies and 
the agnosticism of the ‘nineties. Victorian 
art, whether in literature, poetry or painting, 
arose rather as a protest against materialism, 
utilitarianism and similar social doctrines. 
Thus the revolt of the medizvalists came 
with Rossetti. He and his followers found 
satisfaction in old-world dreams, as Whistler 
found an escape in esthetic moods. Later 
came the Pierrotic nightmares of Beardsley 
and, finally, the devastating mockeries of the 
Post-Impressionists, the Cubists and other 
ultra-moderns. 

Watts was not associated with any of 
these Victorian ‘‘isms.” Rather he was 
the artist of the Aristocratic Compromise. 
Realizing the consequences of the Reform 


Bill, a section of the aristocracy of Britain 


54 External Influences 


determined to make terms with the Middle 
Class. Watts was one of the recruits which 
aristocracy made from the lower middle 
class : Carlyle was another ; his “‘ Latter Day 
Pamphlets ’’ convinced many a doubter that 
a beneficent despotism was a far from un- 
satisfactory form of Government. The 
Aristocratic Compromise proved so successful 
that, within eight years of the passing of the 
Reform Bill, Peel had rallied the newly- 
enfranchised voters to the Tory Party, to the 
support of established institutions. And, 
in truth, the aristocrats did much to justify 
their alliance with the masses. Though the 
railways and steamships were reducing the 
value of their estates, the great landlords 
were generous in decreasing rents and accept- 
ing agrarian reforms, and Lord Shaftesbury 
and his Tory associates took the lead in the 
factory reforms of 1843 and 1847, which 


resulted in the labour of women and children 


Morality Paintings 55 


being limited to ten hours a day. Later, 
Maurice, Kingsley, and the Christian 
Socialists took over some of the functions of 
the Chartists. 

Of the two movements, Watts was more 
Closely associated with the reformers, led 
by Lord Shaftesbury. Despite his birth, 
Watts became a convinced aristocrat. He 
said, ‘I confess I should like to have a fine 
name and a great ancestry; it would be 
delightful to me to feel as though a long 
line of worthies were looking down upon 
me and urging me to sustain their dignity.’ 
Imbued with such ideas, he had little sym- 
pathy with the destruction of class-dis- 
tinctions threatened by democracy. Born 
twenty years too late to share the sympathies 
of Shelley and the Romanticists who revolted 
against the reaction typified by the Holy 
Alliance, Watts was moved by the sorrows 


of the poor as Mrs. Browning and Hood 


56 External Influences 


were moved. For a while after his return 
from Italy the failure of his efforts to revive 
fresco painting in England resulted in a 
series of pictures which included Found 
Drowned, The Irish Famine and the Seam- 
stress, the latter echoing Hood’s ‘Song of 
the Shirt,’ as Found Drowned echoed Hood’s 
‘One more Unfortunate, weary of Breath.’ 
In 1850, Watts exhibited The Good Samaritan, 
which he dedicated to Thomas Wright, a 
Manchester philanthropist, who had done 
much for discharged prisoners. Watts’s 
association with Lord and Lady Holland 
cemented his alliance with the aristocratic 
reformers, alike against the Whig capitalists 
and the reforming Chartists. 

Yet, in spite of these political views, it is 
impossible to label Watts, the artist, Tory 
or Whig or Revolutionary. Rather he was 
a good man, with the indignation of a good 


man faced with wrongs. He once proposed 


“ The Minotaur” 57 


to make a statue of Mammon and set it up 
in Hyde Park, in the hope that Mammon’s 
worshippers would be honest enough to 
bow the knee. The plan was not carried 
through. Instead the picture Mammon 
was painted in 1885 and dedicated “ To 
All his Worshippers.”’ 

In the same year the crusade which W. T. 
Stead called the “‘ Maiden Tribute of Modern 
Babylon’’ goaded Watts into painting 
The Minotaur, the _ personification of 
brutalised vice which hangs in the Tate 
Gallery. Half beast, half man, the Minotaur 
watches from his fortress wall. A little 
bird is crushed in his cruel claw. As in 
Watts’s Jonah, the theme is an old-world 
story, but the application is for our own 
time. Every nine years the Cretan con- 
querors of Athens compelled the city to 
send a tribute of seven youths and seven 


maidens. A  black-sailed ship took the 
F 


58 External Influences 


unfortunates to Crete. They were thrown 
into the Minotaur’s labyrinth to wander 
wildly until devoured by the monstrous 
brute. The Greek tale gave him the first 
idea, but Watts had put the original myth 
aside before the first sketch was completed. 
The burden which lay upon his soul, and 
which he wished his countrymen also to bear, 
was the horror of those girls, fifteen, sixteen 
and seventeen years of age, sacrificed week 
after week upon the altar of man’s vice. 
After reading Mr. Stead’s article he went to 
his studio and in three hours painted the 
picture as we see it to-day. None will desire 
to see the public galleries of Europe and 
America filled with such denunciations. 
But they may well feel that Watts would 
have been less than the man this study 
shews him to have been if he had not been 
moved to a heartfelt protest through the 


only means at his command—his art. 





Tate Gallery 


MAMMON 
G. F. WATTS 





« So 4 


re ee ee ee em eR 


** Mammon ” 59 


Mammon is the symbol of the environ- 
ment which makes a Modern Babylon 
possible. There were slave drivers in the 
past; to-day, there is Mammon. Cruel 
and insolent, moneybags in lap, Watts pic- 
tured the gorgeous golden draperies hanging 
awkwardly from the brown-skinned and 
coarsed-limbed God of Modernity. The 
naked boy and girl whom Mammon crushes 
are types of the humanity which has accepted 
the serfdom of the god. The thought 
symbolised in the picture has been admir- 
ably analysed in Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s 
study of Watts. Chesterton imagines a 
man, sick of the conventional argosies and 
cornucopias of Commerce, stopping before 
Watts’s picture in the Tate Gallery and being 
arrested by it. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘this is 
something which in spirit and essence I 
have seen before. That bloated, uncon- 


scious face, so heavy, so violent—that is 


60 External Influences 


Commerce and this is why men fear him and 
why men endure him.’ 

Does such a picture as Mammon diminish 
vice? Does it increase virtue? Whatever 
may be the answer, the diminution of vice 
is not the primary aim of an artist; the 
painter whose only aim is moral edification 
will fail in comparison with the artist who 
is absorbed in the effort to reach the perfec- 
tion granted to him by his material. Never- 
theless, the intellectual power to grip and 
develop current thought, and the emotional 
power to express it with enthusiasm and 
conviction, are signs of an outstanding 
personality. By such means an artist or 
thinker imprints his influence upon his age. 
The desire to treat the problems of his day 
is part of a high-minded and full-hearted 
personality. Even if an artist cannot 
directly increase virtue, he may lift the 


individual beholder from one stratum of 





“ Jonah” 61 


temptation to another, where right-doing 
is less difficult. In this sense the endeavour 
of a poet-painter need not be in vain, even 
from the standpoint of morals. Writing 
to the Bishop of Newcastle in 1900, Watts 
defined his moral purpose by drawing the 
analogy that, as music echoes the Divine 
voice heard in Creation, art should clear 
the sight to the manifestation of the Divine 
power in the loveliness of nature. There 
were times, however, when social wrong- 
doing stirred Watts to a direct expression 
of his beliefs. Then, like the prophet in 
his own Jonah, he flung out his arms and 
cried the Almighty’s warning: 

“Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be 
overthrown | ” 

The Jonah is in the Tate Gallery. In 
the frieze at the back of the gaunt prophet, 
Watts depicted the sins of a godless age— 


gambling, money grubbing and drunkenness. 


62 External Influences 


The form of the carved reliefs is such as 
might have been seen in the palace of a 
Babylonian despot 2,500 years ago. But 
Watts speaks to this present time. His 
message was to those who lived in 1895 and 
to us, their children, who are recreating 
Britain after the devastation, material and 
spiritual, wrought by a World War. 

For He Had Great Possessions is yet 
another sermon in paint. When at work upon 
the canvas, Watts said, ‘“‘ Now I am doing 
a man’s back, little else than his back, 
to explain the verse :—‘ And he was sad at 
that saying and went away grieved’”’: 
Watts went on, “‘ Fancy a man turning his 
back on Christ rather than give away his 
goods! They say his back looks sorrowful. 
Maybe. At any rate, that is what I meant 
to express.”’ 

Progress is a social sermon in a less con- 


crete form, and being a late work (1903-4) 


“ Progress ” 63 


is more representative of Watts the Christian 
Stoic than of Watts the social prophet. 
The imagination of the painter had long 
brooded over the Riders of the Revelation, 
and in Progress he pictured the Rider 
on the White Horse as a symbol of the 
onward march of humanity. A crown had 
been given to him who sat on the White 
Horse, and he went forth conquering, and 
to conquer. From the guidance of the 
Rider there turns one to search for wisdom, 
with no more aid than a guttering candle, 
and another to grub in the muck for gold; 
while a third mortal sleeps, a fourth sees, 
and understanding the Vision, holds his 
gaze upon the Light. 

Life’s Illusion, now in the Tate Gallery, 
was one of the earliest pictures in which 
Watts expressed his philosophy of life and 
conduct. It was painted at Dorchester 


House in 1847, when the influence of Italy 


64 External Influences 


was strong upon him. A knight on horse- 
back pursues the rainbow-tinted bubble of 
glory ; female forms, symbols of the hopes 
and ambitions which torment humanity, 
hover above ; while a child chases a butterfly, 
recalling the elusiveness of fame and power. 
With Time and Oblivion, completed at 
the same time, Life's Illusions was one 
of Watts’s favourites among his own works, 
doubtless because it was one of his first 
efforts to put his philosophy of life into form 
and colour. After the memorable exhibition 
of Watts’s work at the New Gallery in the 
winter of 1896-7, the painter said that 
these pictures were the two which seemed 
to come near his mark. Of Time and 
Oblivion, he added, “I think Phidias would 
have said, ‘Go on, you may do something.’”’ 
In 1902 he said, “ It is in many respects my 
best picture.” 


One can understand the return of an old 


Time and Oblivion” 65 


man to a youthful love and yet realise that 
the direct influence of Titian and the great 
Italians had to be shed before the fully- 
characteristic canvases of twenty and thirty 
years later were possible. There is no ‘ best 
picture’ by Watts, for the man and his 
message are only revealed to those who will 
link a dozen canvases into a single impression 
and understand that the painter revealed 
himself, not by what he did in one or ten 
years, but by what he did during a life of 


ninety years. 


CHAPTER III. 


STYLE AND SUBJECTS. 


HOUGH portrait painting occupied a 
great part of Watts’s early and middle 

life, and he produced more than three hundred 
portraits in oils, and numberless heads in 
chalk, pastel and pencil, Watts said ‘“ Por- 
traiture is notinmyline.”’ His search for the 
abiding rather than the passing, and his 
insistence upon the beautiful as opposed to the 
ignoble in human character, however, are seen 
as clearly in the pictures of Tennyson, of Man- 
ning, of Carlyle and the rest as in the purely 
imaginative works. The comparison afforded 
by the portraits of Watts with the realistic 
portraiture in an Academy or a Salon is also 
significant. Watts was under no misappre- 


hension as to the difficulties under which a 
66 


Watts’s Portraits 67 


modern portrait painter labours and which 
persuade many portrait painters to content 
themselves with mere likenesses. Remem- 
bering the difficulties Watts said, ‘‘ Any fool 


I 


can copy,’ adding that a photographic lens 
would accomplish these mere copyings of 
Nature far more accurately than any artist 
could hope to do. It is the soul that a man 
puts upon the canvas for the delight and 
improvement of his fellow-men that the lens 
cannot accomplish. Nevertheless, in a letter 
to Mr. Spielmann, the painter also said, “ It 
is a mistake to consider that my portraiture 
is in the ordinary sense ideal ; it is intended, 
on the contrary, to be very real, and to make 
it so my endeavour is to paint the mental 
as well as the physical likeness. I always 
try, as the chief essential, to sink myself 
altogether in the portraits I paint.” 
Realism and the search for the real are 


very different things; Watts’s aim was to 


68 Style and Subjects 


make each portrait the summary of a life, 
not the record of a moment or an hour. 
When painting Tennyson in 1889, Watts 
expressly said that his aim was to shew the 
grandeur of the poet’s head, not by accen- 
tuating or emphasising—the method of the 
mere likeness maker—but rather by keeping 
in mind those lines which are the noblest. 
“What I try for is the half unconscious 
insistence upon the nobilities of the subject.” 
While Watts was painting the earlier portrait 
of Tennyson in 1858, the poet was writing 
“Lancelot and Elaine’”’; he asked the 
painter what was in his mind when he set 
to work on a portrait. Later Watts’s reply 
was translated into Tennysonian verse, and 
is to be found in the memorable lines :— 


As when a painter, poring on a face, 
Divinely thro’ all hindrance finds the man 
Behind it and so paints him that his face, 
The shape and colour of a mind and life, 
Lives for his children, ever at its best 
And fullest. 


Comparison with Sargent 69 


“Ever at its best.” How many of the 
greater portrait painters of to-day claim 
such an aim? Could Tennyson’s lines be 
applied to their life’s work without foolish- 
ness? Many, whose canvases fill big spaces 
at the Academy or the Salons, are not even 
loyal to their subjects. It has been said of 
Sargent that “he hates his sitters with 
splendid accuracy.” There have been times 
in art when such hatred was required. 
Perhaps Sargent is a necessity. But to-day 
the world has more need of the sympathetic 
penetration of character, for our age values 
too lightly what is enduring in the spirit. 
Just because his art is so full an embodiment 
of the modern spirit, Sargent is over-faithful 
in portraying what is fleeting. Posterity will 
judge between the ideals of Sargent and of 
Watts, and it will admit that Watts had not 
the assured technique of some modern 


portrait painters ; at times he had to wrestle 


70 Style and Subjects 


with his pigment; but he found things to 
love where Sargent found something less 
than noble. 

Watts was not an unprejudiced critic of a 
Sargent portrait. But there is much in his 
dictum that ‘“ Sargent’s figures exist with 
startling vividness but they do not live. 
They are as if electrified, galvanised into a 
violent temporary existence.” The com- 
parison between the two forms of art suggests 
that there is a more lofty truth in the concep- 
tion which comes from and returns to the 
in-dwelling spirit, as was the manner of 
Watts. There are moments when this 
in-dwelling spirit transfigures a face and 
these are the moments which the great 
portrait painter must seize; for they 
are the moments humanity should 
treasure. 

Watts always counted his portrait of 


Carlyle, painted in 1867 and now in the 


“ Thomas Carlyle” 71 


National Portrait Gallery, a failure. He 
was conscious that the sitting was wearisome 
to Carlyle. ‘“‘I said I would sit and so I 
will do so,’ said Carlyle doggedly when 
Watts apologised. Yet Meredith wrote of 
this apparent failure, “‘ Carlyle has the look 
of Lear encountering the storm on the 
Cornish coast. You have given him that 
look in your portrait.” Whether Meredith 
was right, or whether the hammer-hammer 
spirit of Carlyle escaped the gentler-souled 
painter, still it was the man behind the mask 
whom Watts wished to set down, for that 
was the real man—the Carlyle who had 
taught all earnest people that they must 
take life seriously and do some work for the 
world; that there is a yea and a nay, and 
that all must make choice of the one or 
the other. 

Others of the series in the National 


Portrait Gallery equally repay analysis 


72 Style and Subjects 


from the stand-point of setting down 
what was eternal in the man. Morris, 3 
with the ‘‘mystery”’ look in his shrewd 
grey eyes; alert at times, but ready 
enough to dream when the catapult mood 
was not uppermost. The rocky-counten- 
anced Lyndhurst ; Walter Crane, a picture 
beautiful in the quality of the very paint, as 
suited the picture of a fellow in the craft ; the 
portrait of Leighton, too, another painter ; and 
perhaps the most remarkable of all, Manning 
in his cardinal-red robes, who lives in these 
few feet of painted canvas as surely as he 
does in the word-study of Lytton Strachey. 
Read what the historian has to tell and then 
seek out Watts’s picture; the relation 
between ultimate truth and what is enduring 
in human character will become plainer. 
The method of Watts did not necessarily 
result in loss of power; seeking “ the best ” 


in each sitter did not necessarily mean 


National Portrait Gallery Vie 


flattery. Manning was a big enough figure 
in mid-Victorian social history to be interest- 
ing without flattery. ° 

The noble series in the National Portrait 
Gallery was inaugurated in 1883 when Watts 
presented to the nation his Lyndhurst, 
his Stratford de Redcliffe and the Lord Lyons. 
In 1895, to celebrate the opening of the 
new buildings in St. Martin’s Place, Watts 
added seventeen other canvases, including 
the Matthew Arnold, the Browning, the 
Mill, the Manning, the Rossetti, the later 
Tennyson, the Carlyle, the Owen Meredith and 
the Siv Henry Taylor. Already there was 
the nucleus of a portrait gallery of eminent 
Victorians. Later when Morris died, Watts 
gave the Gallery his picture of the poet of 
British democracy, and, when Lord Leighton 
passed away, the beautiful canvas, painted in 
1881, of his friend the President of the Royal 


Academy. The Walter Crane came to 
G 


74 Style and Subjects 


the National Portrait Gallery in 1915, 
a noble harmony in golden browns and an 
abiding evidence of how well Watts could 
paint. 

Under Watts’s will other portraits of 
eminent contemporaries passed to the nation, 
as each followed Watts to the grave, the 
Swinburne and others. It is a pity that the 
hanging arrangements in the National Por- 
trait Gallery do not permit of all the Watts 
portraits being placed in a single room. 
Perhaps this may still be possible ; if so an 
artistic joy will be added to the historical and 
intellectual records provided. by the gener- 
osity and far-sighted vision of the poet- 
portrait painter. 

In an equally noble, though less uniformly 
successful, series of women portraits, Watts 
avoided alike the mood of easy flattery and 
psychological analysis. In place of individual 


character, he emphasised what he saw of 


Women Portratts 75 


grace in womanhood. When the history of 
Victorian womanhood is written, it will be 
— illustrated by many pictures by Watts from 
the early Lady Holland and the gracious 
Marchioness of Waterford (1848). to the 
sumptuous full length, The Hon. Mrs. Percy 
Wyndham (1877) and the Miss Rachel 
Gurney of 1885, better known as _ the 
Countess of Darnley, which hangs in Cobham 
Hall, Kent. The brush of Watts assures 
us that there are qualities in English 
womanhood which escape a Laszlo, a Boldini, 
and even a Sargent, qualities which we may 
hope are more abiding than those which so 
many portrait painters discover in the 
women of our time. 

Of Watts’s landscapes, not a large part of 
his lifework, it will suffice to say that the 
ideal quality found in so much of his art 
is to be traced in them also. The Dove 
that Returned (1869) and The Dove that 


76 Style and Subjects 


Returned Not may be regarded as sea- 
scapes or as Biblical illustration, as the 
spectator chooses. The Mount Ararat and 
the Carrara Mountains, both painted in 
the ’eighties, also witness to the painter’s 
obsession with the eternal in nature, rather 
than the passing. To copy a natural scene 
was not enough and a measure of the lofty 
imaginings of Watts passed into his land- 
scapes as they passed into the allegories and 
portraits. He knew that nature and human- 
ity alike are forms of the creative joy of God, 
and in the light of this knowledge he painted 
both. Towards the close of his life Watts’s 
interest in landscape painting increased, but, 
for the most part, these broadly-painted 
sketches recall holidays in which the master 
renewed his contact with the natural world, 
before a fresh bout of work. The sketch 
of Budrum in Asia Minor, with its big rainy 


sky, recalls the Halicarnassus tour with Sir 





Landscapes q7 


Charles Newton; the Savoy Alps and the 
Highlands sketches recall the visit to 
Switzerland in 1887, and the trip to Scotland 
in 1899, when the broad belts of heather and 
the colour of the hills and lochs of Inverness 
impressed themselves so strongly upon the 
painter’s imagination. Lastly, the night 
scenes at Freshwater and Farringford are 
instinct with memories of visits to the 
Tennysons in the Isle of Wight. 

Themes drawn directly from Greek legend 
~ make up a goodly part of Watts’s life-work. 
In a well-known picture he represented Diana 
in pale blue robes and still retaining the form 
of the crescent moon, descending earthwards 
to touch the lips of her mortal lover. The 
subject of Orpheus and Eurydice made a 
special appeal to Watts on account of his 
life-long obsession with the mystery of 
death. Perhaps the painting of this subject 


which haunts the memory most surely is the 


od 


78 Style and Subjects 


half-length painted in 1869, shewing Eurydice 
fainting in her husband’s arms as she hears 
the dread summons, though this version of 
the story has less of romance than the full- 
length picture which shews the lute falling 
from the singer’s hand and the lily dropping 
from the dying woman ; for that very reason 
it better suggests the mingled restraint and 
emotion which betokened the Greek in the 
presence of death. 

The myth of Psyche and Eros made its 
appeal to Watts as part of a long series of 
picture-poems, dealing with the mystery of 
Love. The Greek story expressed the union 
of the human soul and the divine principle 
of Love, felt but unseen. Yearning to see 
the mysterious god, Psyche lights her lamp 
and Eros is taken from her. Only through 
suffering does she find him once more. In 
Watts’s picture, Psyche stands in the grey 


dawn looking with downcast eyes upon the 


SLLYM °H °S 
SDIGAYNSA ANV SNAHdsO 


UuorsatjoD Wwpypud A 








* 


Greck Pictures 70 


smouldering lamp and the crimson feathers 
torn from the wings of the flying Eros. Too 
late, she knows what she has lost. 

A score of other pictures might be men- 
tioned derived from Greek mythology. The 
Childhood of Zeus, Ganymede, Daphne, 
Hyperion, Prometheus, the two pictures of 
the deserted Ariadne, The Bacchanal, Europa, 
Mount Olympus and Dawn. The Wife of 
Pygmalion, which Gladstone so admired, was 
painted in 1868; of the picture, Swinburne 
wrote: “So it seems a Greek painter must 
have painted women, when Greece had 
immortal pictures fit to match her imperish- 
able statues. In this translation of a Greek 
statue into an English picture, no less than 
in the bust of Clytie, we see how, in the hands 
of a great artist, painting and sculpture 
may become sister arts indeed, yet without 
invasion or confusion; how, without any 


forced alliance of form and colour, a picture 


80 Style and Subjects 


may share the gracious grandeur of the subtle 
bloom of beauty proper to a statue.”’ 

The beautiful bronze of Clytie is now in the 
Tate Gallery. Apart from its power and 
grace, the work has an honourable place 
in the history of the renaissance of English 
sculpture. It was modelled some years 
before Leighton’s Athlete and Python and 
has a full measure of the naturalism which 
English sculpture required if the art was 
to be lifted from the groove of conven- 
tionalism in which it had been moving for 
half a century, in spite of the noble efforts 
of Alfred Stevens. In the Clytie there are 
the qualities of classic art, nobility of concep- 
tion, largeness of treatment and an absence 
of that realism which shews that the artist’s 
imagination did not suffice to fuse his visions 
into a new unity. The Clytie was studied 
from three models. Watts’s favourite model, 


Long Mary, : suggested the magnificence 


 Clytie” 81 


of line and the flexibility of movement ; the 
muscles were drawn from a male model; 
while Margaret Burne-Jones, then a child of 
three, was the inspiration for some of the 
most telling masses and curves. For the 
rest, Watts had the story of the nymph 
beloved of the Sun God, who pined in grief 
when deserted by her lover and was changed 
at last into the sun-flower. The poet tells 
that the flower ever turns its face to the sun 
in its course. 

The right use of the human model and the 
wedding of the mortal being to the ever- 
lasting thought, be it narrative or idea, are 
things which can most surely be learnt from 
the Greek example. Writing of the Par- 
thenon statuary, Watts said :— 


** The Greeks taught me all my principles of form. 
After very careful study I found that they, perceiv- 
ing in the skeleton the identity, with modifications, 
of the structure of the lower animals, took the 
greatest pains to accentuate all that belonged 


82 Style and Subjects 


exclusively to the human.... The Greek ac- 
centuated the straightness of the forehead, the 
projection of the brows, the straightness of the 
line of the nose, because they were all entirely human 
characteristics. The Greeks shortened the space 
between the chest and the stomach and lengthened 
it from the throat to below the breast in man and 
woman.” 


Even in technical matters Watts strove 
to find the general rule and the philosophical 
justification. True, the knowledge that 
came to him through the great Greeks was 
only second-hand. The decorators and 
builders of the Parthenon were in daily 
contact with sights and experiences which 
Watts knew only too well were lacking in 
modern life, to the great loss of painters and 
sculptors. Nevertheless, the Greek example 
was potent enough to stamp its impress upon 
his imagination to life’s end. 

The example of the Greek sculptor did 
much for Watts. But it failed to suggest 


Greek Example 83 


a complete solution of the nineteenth century 
problem. Whereas the Athenian was mainly 
occupied with ideas of an intellectual order, 
Watts could not quietly put aside every 
thought which defied clear definition. The 
Greek sculptor had even been able to elimin- 
ate the mystery from Death. To him, 
Death was no more than a woman with 
features veiled. Such a symbol does not 
suffice for the European of our day. The 
fear of death is too deeply ingrained in our 
nature to be exorcised thus easily. We shall 
return to the part which Death and the 
representation of Death had in Watts’s art 
and philosophy. For the present it is 
sufficient to emphasise that it was the Greek 
example, and particularly the sculptures of 
the Parthenon, which assured Watts that 
great art and a full life are indissolubly 
connected. Greek art was not a _ thing 


apart from Greek life. A sense of high 


} aaa Style and Subjects 


national achievement and a radiant con- 
sciousness of a happy harmony of human 
powers were the true source of its beauty and 
worth. The crowning satisfaction of the 
Greek as artist was that the people were ever 
preparing themes for their sculptors, their 
dramatists and their poets, and the people 
saw to it that those themes did not escape 
the possibility of clear definition. The Greek 
artist was forced to content himself with 
subjects which he could express lucidly. 
Hence the perfection of Greek sculpture, a 
perfection which shewed Watts how much 
he needed the guiding and guarding criticism 
of large bodies of his countrymen. 

Let there be no mistake. Ancient Greece 
furnished an example to Watts but there was 
no question of copying from some other age 
than his own. What the Greek had, and 
what Watts hungered for, was the under- 


standing and appreciation of his own people ; 


“* House of Life” 85 


Watts, on the contrary, always felt he was 
working alone. His methods were so unlike 
those of other men that for long years his 
countrymen were puzzled. [If his life’s work 
proved only a series of sonnets when it might 
have been an epic, it was because the 
Englishman was denied a vital contact with 
his fellows. But Watts, like William Cory, 
never prayed for dryads to haunt the woods 
again :— 


More welcome were the presence of hungering, 
thirsting men, 


Whose doubts we could unravel, whose hopes we 
could fulfil, 


Our wisdom tracing backward, the river to the 
rill ;sx 


Were such beloved forerunners one summer day 
restored, 


Then, then we might discover the Muse’s mystic 
hoard. 
Had the faith and experience of Watts 
attained epic form, it would have found 
expression in his House of Life. To the 


last, Watts professed himself unable to 


86 Style and Subjects 


formulate his beliefs upon the place of 
man in the scheme of creation, but he recog- 
nised that mankind has been divinely 
dowered. He saw Humanity placed, as it 
were, in some mysterious hall, vaulted by 
the blue heavens; here, dwelling in the 
presence of the Creator, man was left to a 
life of endeavour, rejoicing in the beauty of 
existence, and accepting his position with 
seriousness, modesty, sympathy and above 
all, sincerity. It was a dream of the painter 
to build a symbolical House of Life. In its 
halls and corridors, he designed to place 
a series of pictures upon the mysteries of life 
and death as bodied forth in the history of 
human existence. From a memorandum 
drawn up by the painter, we may gain an 
impression of the House of Life, as Watts 
imagined it. The ceiling of the central hall 
was to be painted with the fathomless blue 
of space, from which the Sun, the Earth and 


“ House of Life”’ 87 


the Moon would shine forth and suggest the 
prime fact of the Universe, the Immensity of 
Time. So the picture Time and Oblivion 
was to come into its place in the general 
scheme. Attendant upon the Earth were the 
twin, but antagonistic, forces of Attraction 
and Repulsion, the negative and positive 
poles of electricity. Dividing the ceiling 
by a golden band, upon which were the Signs 
of the Zodiac, Watts purposed to paint a 
nearer view of the scene in space and time 
against which the Divina Commedia is 
unfolded. Gigantic figures stretched at full 
length were to represent the mountain ranges, 
which make up the bony structure of the 
planet; silence and repose characterised 
the Titans. The revolving centuries, per- 
sonified by womanly figures of beauty, were 
to glide beneath the crags upon which the 
gigantic forms lay, suggesting the negligible 


effects of Time upon the everlasting hills, as 


88 Style and Subjects 


compared with the effects of Time upon 
humanity. The ceiling completed, Watts 
proposed to fill the House of Life with pictures 
which would illustrate the story of man— 
first the hunter, slowly raising himself above 
the brute beasts; next the pastoralist and 
the tamer and trainer of the domestic animals. 
So Watts conceived the coming of a patri- 
archal Golden Age, a time when men enjoyed 
as much happiness as humanity is heir to, 
equally removed from the torments of ambi- 
tion and the degradations of a merely animal 
existence. Here Watts proposed to introduce 
themes drawn from the Book of Job. 

But the Golden Age ended. Watts 
imagined the coming of the tyrant, the rise 
of slavery, and the congregation of men in 
great cities, until the pageant of the historic 
civilisations commenced. Egypt, Babylonia, 
Palestine, Persia, India, Greece, Rome, the 


dawn of Christianity, the coming of the 


Manchester Town Hall 89 


Middle Ages, the rise of the Saracen power, 
and the Crusades. Watts purposed to 
illustrate them all, until the House of Life 
was furnished with a pictured history of the 
Spirit of Man. 

The House of Life of Watts, like Rodin’s 
Tower of Labour, never gained material form. 
Similarly, the scheme for the decoration of 
the Town Hall, Manchester, projected in 
1879, failed to reach accomplishment. For 
Manchester, Watts imagined a series of 
symbolic pictures bodying forth the happi- 
ness that might come if the higher human 
aspirations could be realised and the degrada- 
tion which comes from disobedience to the 
divine law could be avoided. Time, Death 
and Judgment and the Court of Death 
would have had their place in this scheme. 
Both the House of Life and the decoration 
of the Manchester Town Hall proved beyond 


Watts’s achievement and so must be ranked 
H 


go Style and Subjects 


among the lost opportunities which might 
have welded his craft and thought into epic 
form. Even the best among Watts’s con- 
temporaries did not understand the ideal 
enshrined in the House of Life. Kingsley, 
Maurice and the Christian Socialists, who 
might have been expected to sympathise 
with it, sought expression for the aesthetic 
and spiritual strivings of the mid-Victorian 
age in other directions. Ruskin and the 
pre-Raphaelites were equally far from under- 
standing this part of Watts’s aim. Never- 
theless half a dozen pictures which might have 
made their mute appeal from the walls of 
the House of Life remain, most of which 
may be found in the Watts Room at the 
Tate Gallery. 

Chaos might have been the first picture 
in the cycle of the Progress of Cosmos. 
In it we see the passing of the world from the 
first wild negation of all things to the beauty 


“ Chaos” QI 


of ordered creation. On the one side is the 
tumultuous upheaval and disturbance before 
the Spirit brooded over the waters, a tumult 
of disorder which is rendered the more 
significant by the rocky forms of the Titans 
who cleave the earthy masses of which they 
are still a part. In his vision of Chaos, 
or Cosmos, as he would have preferred 
to call the picture, Watts must have had in 


mind the familiar lines from ‘In Memoriam.’ 


The hills are shadows and they flow 

From form to form and nothing stands: 
They melt like mists, the solid lands, 

Like clouds they shape themselves and go. 


In the middle of the design, where the vast, 
immeasurable abyss, outrageous, wasteful, 
wild, is stilled by the passing of the 
Shaper of Things, the vaporous uncertainty 
of the sky suggests the Creator’s thought 
of creatures yet unborn. [Everything is 


potentially in the cosmic vapour, because 


92 Style and Subjects 


everything lay potentially in the mind and 
creating hand of the Shaper of Things. Light 
is there, but it is veiled in mist. Air and 
water are still commingled. On the other 
side of the picture are giant forms, symbols 
of the newly created continents as they arose 
about the vast mountain ranges, and below 
the dancing figures of the Hours, symbolising 
the passage of time. 

The forms of the mountains in Chaos 
were suggested to the painter by the stains 
and cracks on the damp plaster of a wall. 
Sung Ti, a Chinese painter of the Eleventh 
Century, used a similar device for stirring 
the imagination to the search for what lies 
beyond natural things. To a pupil, he said, 
“You should choose an old tumbledown 
wall and throw over it a piece of white silk, 
Morning and evening you should gaze at it, 
until at length you see the ruin through the 


silk ; its prominences, its levels, its zigzags 


“ Chaos” 93 


and its cleavages, storing them in the mind 
and fixing them in the eye. Gradually 
these prominences, wrinkles and hollows 
will assume the shapes of mountains, streams 
and forests ; you can fancy travellers wander- 
ing among them and birds flying through the 
air.” As Watts looked upon the mouldering 
plaster he saw in vision the whole composi- 
tion of Chaos. Years after, he painted 
the picture. Finally, when he had lived for 
a while under the shadow of the Alps, Watts 
was able to echo the cry of Turner. Not only 
the Sun, but the everlasting hills were God. 
He had not been wrong in seeing in the snow- 
clad mountains most sure symbols of the 
Creator’s work. ‘‘ It would,” he said, ‘‘ be 
worth anything to live amongst such hills 
and have them to look at at all times.” 
Partaking of earth and sky, they combined 
the strength and reality of mortal earth with 


the blue-celestial of eternity. 


94 Style and Subjects 


The picture of Chaos would have been 
one of a series picturing the story of mankind 
as it has come to us in biblical, mythical, 
poetical and verifiable history. The three 
pictures of the Eve series also had a place 
in the unfulfilled ambition. With the crea- 
tion of Eve, the world was finished, the 
Spirits of the upper air were free to rise in 
triumph to heaven. Watts embodied his 
imaginings of this stupendous moment in 
the canvas, She shall be called Woman. 
Newly born, with the glow of Creation still 
about her, Eve rises amid a profusion of 
fruit and flowers. Purple and white cro- 
cuses spring in her path ; lilies, the emblems 
of purity, are at her side, yet, at her feet, is 
the gleam of the serpent’s scales. Above, 
the clouds mingle with her hair and woman 
reaches beyond the rainbow of hope. Only 
the face is hidden, in as much as woman is not 


yet known in the fulness of her perfection ; 


“ She shall be called Woman ” 95 


the upturned features are shadowed in the 
midst of light. It is not the Eve of Genesis ; 
it is not the Eve of Milton. Rather, it is the 
Eve of all time—strong, fresh, vital, electric— 
an embodiment of the ideal inheritance of 
humanity from the great Earth Mother. 
In “‘ The Annals of an Artist’s Life,’’ Mrs. 
Watts tells that her husband saw Eve as the 
central figure of the Universe, that which 
Plato had seen as a column of light extending 
through the heaven and the earth, in colour 
resembling the rainbow, only brighter and 
purer. Writing to Mr. Spielmann regarding 
She shall be called Woman, Watts said 
that the picture would be wholly out of 
place on the Academy walls. “I should 
like to have it criticised in the Elgin Room 
of the British Museum, while the two first 
books of ‘ Paradise Lost’ were read, or 
Beethoven’s ‘ Moonlight Sonata’ was being 


played.” 


96 Style and Subjects 


Watts was not a scientific painter, but he 
was not unmindful of the effects of different 
lines, masses, and colours upon the feelings. 
Hoffding, in his ‘‘ Outlines of Psychology,” 
touches upon the matter, and shews that 
purple, red, orange, and yellow have a 
stimulating effect and excite activity and 
movement. Blues, on the contrary, are 
depressing. Goethe once described the mood 
induced by looking at a landscape through 
yellow glasses on a dark winter’s day. He 
tells how the eye rejoices, the heart expands, 
the mind is cheered, an immediate warmth 
seems to breathe in on us. Blue, on the 
contrary, gives a feeling of chilliness, by 
recalling shadows; green, which comes 
between mournful blue and cheering yellow, 
produces the impression of repose, without 
the cold of blue and the strong stimulus of 
red. Of a brilliantly illuminated landscape, 
looked at through purple glass, Goethe said : 


The Eve Trilogy 97 


“This must be the tone of colour which will 
encompass heaven and earth on the Day of 
Judgment.’’ In composing the trilogy of 
“ Eve,” Watts subordinated everything in 
the design and colour scheme to an expression 
of the three stages through which human life 
must pass. In the first, the newly created 
soul is conscious rather of heaven than of 
earth ; the hands fail to grasp the treasures 
of earth; the foot alone is firmly planted. 
In the second stage—in Eve Tempted— 
the dominion of the senses is over the soul } 
the figure is bent, because the Spirit is 
enslaved. At the feet of Eve lies a panther ; 
the serpent glides among the branches ; 
the woman’s head is thrown back in an 
ecstasy of abandonment to the flowers and 
fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. In the 
third picture—Eve Repentant—the earthly 
paradise has been wrecked. In place of 


the strong columnar line of Woman and 


98 Style and Subjects 


the bent line of utter weakness in Eve 
Tempted, Watts uses the leaning line which 
suggests a return to the upright line of 
strength and yet calls for support. An agony 
of remorse and shame is to be found in the 
colossal form blindly groping for heavenly 
aid. The Eve Repentant contains yet another 
of Watts’s wonderful back views. Note, 
too, the splendid sweep of the great limb 
upward from the firmly planted foot, a 
Mother of Men this. 

As the elemental lines of each picture were 
changed to express the varying emotion, so 
was the colour. In place of the glowing hues 
of She shall be called Woman and the vibrant 
tones of Eve Tempted, the colours of Eve 
Repentant are saddened. In the first picture, 
the sun of creation is smiling upon a new 
world of infinite possibility and beauty; 
in the second, humanity experiences the 


stir of its own vitality, no less attractive 


Cain” 99 


and no less beautiful, but instinct with the 
possibility of evil and sorrow ; in the third, 
where there is a return to relative peace, 
where men and women can accept the world 
as a gift to be enjoyed rather than as a 
possession to be squandered, the colours are 
the low-toned greens and browns of a twilight 
shadowland. 

The Diploma picture painted between 1870 
and 1872, My punishment is greater than 
I can bear was also intended for the House 
of Life. To Watts, the story of Cain and 
Abel was a drama in little of the eternal 
world tragedy of selfish man. Cain was 
the symbol of reckless selfish humanity, ever 
killing his brother. The picture hangs in 
the Diploma Gallery at Burlington House, 
and in it Watts shews the denouncing voices 
of conscience reproaching Cain with the sins 
which culminated in his brother’s death. 


The murderer is even denied the redemption 


100 Style and Subjects 


of human punishment. ‘“ No man may slay 


him.’’ Brute creation itself has no part with 
Cain and “ no birds sing.”’ Yet, all the time, 
Watts imagined an angel voice striving to 
make itself heard above the evil passions 
which haunted the murderer, and, in the 
Death of Cain, painted in 1886, and also in 
the possession of the Royal Academy, Watts 
pictured the murderer as an aged pilgrim. 
Broken by his long journey, Cain has returned 
to die upon Abel’s altar. As he sinks 
repentant upon it, the black cloud of his 
curse is removed and the light of heaven 
once more shines upon him. The sacrifice 
of the contrite heart has been accepted. 
These biblical illustrations and reflections 
may be supplemented by the happy invention 
known as Building the Ark, shewing Noah 
as a patriarchal figure bearing two great 
planks for the boat, which his sons are 


fashioning in the foreground of the design. 





Compton Gallery 


BUILDING THE ARK 


G. F WATTS 


oa 





Pictorial Invention IOL 


Here the painter does not rely upon symbols, 
but upon pictorial invention. The huge 
planks and the mighty limbs of the patriarch 
form a great cross which dominates the 
canvas, lines and masses which are in happy 
contrast to the swirl of the rising waters and 
the curves of the feminine figures in the 
background. All of the pictures of Watts 
do not shew this pictorial invention ; 
at times he relied unduly upon symbolism, © 
which might well have been left in the 
written words of his title. But when Watts 
chose to rely upon pictorial invention, again 
and again he proved himself a master, as in 
the Eve Repentant, the Love and Death 
and the Hope, which may be a charming 
expression of an illusive emotion, but is 
also a concrete representation of some- 
thing seen in the painter’s imagination, 
which has taken form in a combination of 


certain curves and colours. It is important to 


102 Style and Subjects 


emphasise this, as the form of this study, 
centring as it does around the ideas of Watts, 
might suggest that Watts the thinker is what 
matters. Watts the painter can only be 
understood when we recall what the painter 
thought and how he felt. But Watts, just 
because he was a painter, was primarily a 
mind sensitive to form and colour and should 
be judged by his success in selecting the 
forms and colours which best represent the 
world of nature and humanity as he found it. 
Watts was a master-artist by virtue of what 


he did, not by reason of what he thought. 


CHAPTER IV. 


THE QUALITY OF THE ARTIST. 


T remains to pass in rapid review the 
positive factors which made Watts the 
well-loved artist he is, rather than the 
negative circumstances which balked his 
life of its unity. From early manhood, 
Watts used his craft to keep alive what was 
noble in human aspiration and he helped his 
fellow countrymen to see Nature with surer 
and more intelligent insight. In doing this 
he was giving out what was within himself. 
Mrs. Watts, writing of a time before her 
marriage, tells how intercourse with the 
painter opened her eyes to the more beautiful 
aspects of humanity. Walking to the studio 
during a winter when Watts was at Brighton, 


she found the very faces in the street less 
103 


104 The Quality of the Artist 


noble than a year before. Seeing only 
ugliness or worse, she divined that her 
interpretation had been different and that the 
revelation of the soul behind the face was 
failing her. It was Watts’s gift, alike as artist 
and as man, to reveal the nobler overtones 
in human life. Still later, Mrs. Watts tells 
us, a clever woman who knew many of the 
leading men and women of the world said, 
“if I do not see Mr. Watts for some time I am 
the worse for it.”” In the light of this testi- 
mony let us look at yet another series of 
paintings, the only things which now reveal 
Watts the man. There are a number which 
treat aspects of human experience, from the 
moment when Youth is first tempted into the 
rose-wreathed paths of love and pleasure. 
Mischief was painted in 1878 and pictures 
the youth bending beneath the sprite’s 
yoke, heavy, though it is but a wreath of 
flowers. Half ready, half unwilling, the 


“ Mischief” 105 


youth is led by Mischief. In the back- 
ground are the strong towers upon the heights 
which shielded the man, until Mischief 
lured him away with her wiles, her golden 
locks, and the glitter of her iridescent wings. 
Already the roses are turning to briars about 
the limbs of the youth, as he nears the doom, 
suggested by the slough at his feet. 
Earlier, in 1865, Watts painted a similar 
subject suggested by Bojardo’s ‘“ Orlando 
Innamorato.’’ He called it Fata Morgana, 
and it is now in the Municipal Gallery at 
Leicester. The knight is in hot pursuit of 
Fortune, whom he vainly seeks to catch 
by the forelock of her hair, by which alone 
she can be taken. 

The first of these pictures of youth and 
‘atalinsd: the Szv Galahad, has already 
been mentioned. This was designed in 1862. 
Four years later Watts painted Aspiration. 


In the dawn of the morning of life’s battle, he 
I 


106 The Quality of the Artist 


who wishes to be a standard-bearer looks 
out across the plain. He sees into the great 
possibilities of human life and the ardent 
spirit of youth is sobered by the burden of its 
responsibilities. The picture would say, 


with George Herbert :— 


Fool not; for all may have 
If they dare try, a glorious life or grave. 


The painter’s tolerance as a moral teacher 
is shewn in the pictures in which he appealed. 
directly to Christianity. Thus: Faith, 
clad in the colours of charity, becoming con- 
scious of the beauty in the flowers and the joy 
in the songs of birds, washes her blood- 
stained feet in the waters of Truth. She lays 
aside the sword with which she had hitherto 
sought to convert the world. The painter 
desired to embody an idea which would be 
accepted by all godly people and not only by 


those of his own creed. The same vision of 


“ Spirit of Christianity ”’ 107 


the eternal truth which made Faith look up 
and see the myriad-coloured span of mercy 
in the heavens, is found in the Spirit of 
Christianity. Watts exhibited the picture 
in 1875 and dedicated it ‘To All the 
Churches’ as a protest against their un- 
Christian divisions, and in hope that the 
day might yet come when there would be one 
fold and one shepherd. The Spirit of Chris- 
tianity is throned high above the cities and 
plains of the world, and beneath her robe are 
gathered every human type and creed. 
Ruskin may be right in regretting that 
Watts substituted the sublimity of mystery 
for the near presence of the saints and 
angels in mediaeval Christian art. Yet, as 
Ruskin himself admitted, Watts’s vision 
represents an essential difference in religious 
belief, which characterises the faith of our 
time. God is not vividly present to the 
thought of to-day. Watts would have been 


108 The Quality of the Artist 


false to the truth as he saw it, had he 
presented a substantial, bright and near 
presence as the symbol of Twentieth Century 
Christianity. 

Watts wasa mystic. Those who knew him 


¢ 


best felt in the poet-painter “‘an unusual 
presence.’ At times there appeared a 
transcendental self, visible in spite of the 
cumbering outer form. Perhaps it was this 
transcendental self, the Soul’s prism, whom 
Watts pictured in The Dweller in the 
Innermost. Watts imaged her winged, 
sitting silent and = pensive within the 
glow of truth; a star on her forehead ; 
upon her lap, the divine arrows that 
pierce through all shams; and the trumpet 
of the truth which is always in the 
conscience of men, though it may need 
the steadfast strength of a Son of God to 
sound it. 


Watts was a mystic. He once awoke 


Watts the Mystic 109 


from a dream to tell of a great anthem he had 
heard which would have been one of the 
great things of the world if he could have 
written it down. “ Hallelujah, God is 
Great,’’ was the theme. 

He was a mystic, but a practical mystic; 
with him dreaming did not take the place of 
doing ; the deed, not the idea or the word, 
was allimportant. The part Watts assigned 
to action may be found in the statue which 
occupied so much of his later years, the 
equestrian bronze, Physical Energy. The 
statue was unfinished at the artist’s death, 
unfinished as Michelangelo’s Day was 
unfinished. Physical Energy is the em- 
bodiment of that restless impulse to seek the 
unachieved in the world of material things, 
the impulse which drives a modern financier 
to seek to control more and yet more wealth, 
long after he has secured all the satisfaction 


which money can buy; the impulse which 


IIo The Quality of the Artist 


sent Napoleon to Moscow, Alexander to the 
Ganges, and Tamburlaine “ to ride in triumph 
through Persepolis,’ and which Marlowe 


summed up for each one of us in :— 


Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend 
The wondrous architecture of the world, 

And measure every wandering planet’s course, 
Still climbing after knowledge infinite, 

And always moving as the restless spheres, 
Will us to wear ourselves and never rest, 
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all. 


In Physical Energy Watts sought to 
create a figure which should suggest man as 
a part of the whole creation, with his hand 
uplifted to the infinite, and his limbs fashioned 
like the knotted roots of some great tree. 
“TI do not wish my man to be like any model 
you could find anywhere.” In its present 
position in Kensington Gardens it is difficult 
to gain a full idea of the poetry of Physical 
Energy. The low plinth and the dwarfing 


“ Physical Energy ”’ EFL 


effect of the distant line of trees rob the 
statue of some of its power and from the 
front and the back the design is unfortunate, 
but there are aspects which reveal all the 
poet-artist intended. A replica of Physical 
Energy has been placed over the grave of 
Cecil Rhodes in Rhodesia. Those who best 
understand its message will carry the statue 
in imagination from the quiet glade in 
Kensington Gardens to the lonely waste of 
the Matoppo Hills, where the shaded gaze 
of the rider and the strain of the arrested 
horse tell of a continent still unconquered 
by man. As a memorial to Cecil Rhodes, 
Physical Energy gains its full significance. 
It becomes a call to achievements yet 
undreamed of. The placing of Watts’s bronze 
above that grave in the Rhodesian hills is 
proof that the youth of Britain still listens 
to the call which drew Drake to the Horn, 
Cook to Botany Bay and Scott to the Pole, 


112 The Quality of the Artist 


Surely it is a worthy deed to have embodied 
an ideal so truly British in ever-during 
bronze. 

Another noteworthy statue by Watts was 
the big equestrian statue, commenced in 1870, 
of Hugh Lupus, the mythical ancestor of the 
Dukes of Westminster, which was erected 
at Eaton Hall in September 1884. The 
original cast was given to the Crystal Palace 
by the Duke of Westminster. The recum- 
bent statue to Bishop Lonsdale in Lichfield 
Cathedral, dating from 1869, the memorial 
to Lord Lothian for Jedburgh Abbey, and 
the statue of Tennyson which occupied the 
last years of Watts’s life, are other works 
showing that Watts the sculptor was a 
figure in British art of only less interest than 
Watts the painter. 

Realistic portraiture has a manifest con- 
tact with life and such pictures constitute 


a large portion of the best work in a modern 


The Love Pictures 113 


gallery, if only because a high standard can 
be reached by painters whose insight and 
craft would fail them if they essayed more 
imaginative flights. The same may be said 
of landscape painting, in its naturalistic 
aspect. The standard of landscape painting 
is on a high plane, especially in Britain. 
Nevertheless, it will not be by landscape 
painting or portraiture that the general 
public will be won to a sense of the full 
Significance of the arts. The interests of 
humanity are primarily social and it is men 
and women and the thoughts and feelings of 
men and women, that men and women desire 
interpreted. This essay on the life and times 
of Watts, therefore, may fitly conclude 
with a-consideration of the poet-painter’s 
treatment of certain general themes which 
touch us all,—Life and Love and Death. 
The conjunction of words alone suggest a 


Watts picture and for years he was haunted 


114 The Quality of the Artist 


by the desire to make them realities for his 
countrymen. 

The series may be introduced by one of the 
Cupid pictures, let us say Good Luck to 
your Fishing. Then, perhaps, the fancy, 
The Habit does not make the Monk, which 
was painted about 1888 and represents 
Cupid disguised under the cowl ofa monk. A 
pretty girl visiting the studio asked the 
painter ‘‘ At whose door is he knocking ? ” 
Watts retorted, ‘“‘Oh, at yours, perhaps.” 
When Poverty comes in at the Door, Love fies 
out of the Window was painted in a different 
mood and might be added to the category 
of morality paintings. A young wife, 
lying on her couch, is toying with a pet 
bird, careless of the disorder of the house. 
At the door appears hungry-eyed Poverty, 
in the form of a half-clad man; whilst Love, 
taking fright at the sight of the dread figure, 


escapes by the window. 


“‘ Paolo and Francesca” 115 


More poignant in their treatment of love 
were the paintings of Paolo and Francesca, 
from Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” The 
earliest version dates from 1849 but the better 
known was exhibited at the Grosvenor 
Gallery in 1879. In it Watts gave an added 
pathos to a great love tragedy by conceiving 
the hapless lovers as clasped in one another’s 
arms and whirled along on the unceasing 
winds of Hell and, yet, amid the torment, 
still absorbed the one in the other. As an 
illustration of Dante’s poem, many will 
prefer the glowing triptych of Rossetti, 
picturing the lovers amid the tongues of 
flame in the second circle of the Inferno, or 
the strange swirl of passion in Blake’s 
engraving. With Love and Life, dating 
from 1883, and the two companion pictures, 
we come upon a series which spring in 
full meaning and beauty from the vision 
of Watts alone. All are familiar, but the 


116 | The Quality of the Arist 


painter’s commentary helps to make their 
meaning plain. In the first picture, Love 
with protecting wings is leading Life 
over the rocky steeps of existence. Life 
is a weak trembling girl, and as she is 
helped gently up the rugged pathway leading 
to the celestial blue, violets spring where 
Love has trod. Here is not the passion 
aflame in the Francesca story, nor the 
mingled pain and sweetness which made life 
a new thing for the youthful Dante, and yet 
Watts’s Love is not quite the Charity of 
Christianity, whom Watts elsewhere pictured 
as a Madonna-like matron, seated in richly 
coloured raiment, with the children of her 
care. In Love and Life, Watts conceived 
a Love transcending and including all 
other aspects of the Erotes and the Charites 
and made it the emblem of a new religion of 
communal and personal service. He tells 


that for years he sought to understand and 


““ Love and Life” 117 


illustrate a great moral conception of life, 
its duties and its pains and he came to the 
conclusion that, while Justice should be the 
main-spring of human action, Love should 
give the direction. The painter went on to 
describe Love and Life as his best composi- 
tion illustrating this line of thought—Life, 
naked and bare, sustained through the steep 
ways of human conditions, until she reached 
the region of full thought and perfect 
character. From forgetfulness of this re- 
ligion of Love, Watts saw spring almost all 
the injustice and misery of the world. He 
concluded: ‘“‘ This is what my painted 
parable would recall. I would suggest 
frail and feeble human existence aided to 
ascent from the lower to the higher plane by 
Love, with his wide wings of sympathy, 
charity, tenderness and human affection. 
Love is not intended to be either personal 


orcarnal.” And yet as Watts said elsewhere, 


118 The Quality of the Artist 


the Love of his conception had her feet on 
earth, for all that is spiritual in this life must 
gain its impetus from earth. 

The first version of Love and Death was 
exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in 1870. 
Another, painted in 1877, is in the Manchester 
Whitworth Institute. The Tate Gallery 
version was painted in 1887. In 1869, Mrs. 
Barrington tells that Watts was painting 
the portrait of a young man of great promise 
who was dying. The portrait was continued 
at intervals. After each sitting the painter 
felt that the disease had a stronger hold upon 
the youth, that he was dropping closer to 
earth. All that loving friends could do 
was done, and from the memory of those 
fruitless efforts came the basic idea of Love 
and Death. 

Love stands on the threshold of the House 
of Life, barring the entry against the fatal 
advance of Death. Already the bright 


“ Love and Death” 119g 


wings of the god are crushed against the 
lintel, the petals are falling from the roses 
which Love has set about the porch. The 
pale form of Death, clad in white from head 
to foot, his face concealed, presses forward 
with relentless tread; the arm is uplifted 
above the head of Love as though he scarcely 
knows the boy is there. Of the picture, the 
painter wrote, “Love is not restraining 
Death, for it cannot doso. I wish to suggest 
the passionate, though unavailing, struggle 
to avert the inevitable.”’ 

When Watts returned to England after 
his second honeymoon in 1886, the Tate 
Gallery version of Love and Death was 
put upon the easel. Mrs. Watts tells that 
the painter saw that, owing to some subtle 
changes in line or tone, the figure of Death 
had neither the weight nor the slow movement 
he desired. Day after day he thought and 
toiled, each fold of the silver grey robe of 


120 The Quality of the Artist 


Death being deliberately reconsidered, “a 
hair’s breadth of line or a breath of colour 
making the difference that a pause or an 
accentuated word would make in speaking.” 
By raising the outstretched arm, a less judicial 
and severe impression was conveyed; so 
the action was changed from “ I shall ’’ to the 
more tender “‘ Iam compelled.” The shadow 
on the left of the figure, by emphasising the 
spinal line stretching from the bowed head 
to the heel, greatly helps the design, as may 
be seen in a very interesting series of photo- 
graphs taken by Mr. Frederick Hollyer 
while the picture was still in the making in 
Watts’s studio. The colour scheme, too, is 
in beautiful harmony with the theme, the 
golden browns of autumn and the silvery 
greys of winter, mingling with the green 
shadows of Death’s white robe and the rose 
and greens of the flowers and the wings of 


Love. 


“ Love Triumphant” I2I 


The third of the trilogy, Love Triumphant, 
was finished in 1900, at the end of Watts’s 
life. Time and Death, having travelled 
together through the ages, are in the end 
overthrown and Love rises alone on 
immortal wing. Of Love Triumphant the 
painter himself tells us that Time—con- 
_ structor and destroyer—sinks and falls ; Death 
sleeps who once put all to sleep ; Love alone 
triumphant spreads his wings, rising to see 
his native home, his abiding place. Thought 
upon a kindred theme found expression in 
Time, Death and Judgment, a picture which 
was long in the making and exists in several 
forms, including the well-known oil-painting 
in the nave of St. Paul’s Cathedral and 
the interesting mosaic which Watts pre- 
sented to St. Jude’s, Whitechapel, where 
it was placed on an outer wall of the church, 
facing the street. Time, as a youth of un- 


failing strength and vigour, moves hand in 
K 


122 The Quality of the Artist 


hand with Death, a womanly figure of power 
and beauty in her robes of silver-grey and 
green, while, in the clouds above, is the 
crimson-clad figure of Judgment, armed 
with the attributes of Eternal Law. When 
Time, Death, and Judgment was shewn 
at the New Gallery in the summer of 1896 
this motto was inscribed above the frame. 
‘ Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it 
with thy might; for there is no work, nor 
device nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the 
grave, whither thou goest ’—a variation upon 
the moral theme in Aspiration. On an 
adjoining pier of the great arch between 
the dome and the nave of Saint Paul’s hangs 
Peace and Goodwill. Peace is an exile 
from her home but a queenly figure, who 
despite her bruised and bleeding feet turns 
wearily towards the dawn of a happier world, 
which the son upon her knees may yet 


inherit. Mercifully, Watts was spared the 


“ Hope”’ 123 


tragedy of the World War, but, remembering 
some of the pictures acquired by the Imperial 
War Museum, his countrymen may well 
regret that his gentle guidance and insight 
were denied them during those years when 
sacrifice and greed, achievement and death 
mingled so strangely amid the tangled warp 


of our island story. 


La Rochefoucauld has said that there are 
two things upon which mankind cannot look 
fixedly—the sun and death. Among the 
English painters it was Turner who revealed 
the full glory of sunlight. At his life’s end, 
it was a joy to Watts that he had done some- 
thing to remove the terror from death. 
Unlike the greater Greeks, unlike some 
modern men of science, Watts could not 
accept the time between the cradle and the 


grave as self-sufficing. In his Hope he 


124 The Quality of the Artist 


pictured humanity beset with obstinate 
questionings and told of the misgivings of a 
creature moving about in worlds not realised. 
Hope had painfully won her way above the 
world of effort, until a single star told of the 
infinity of starland beyond and the singing 
of a solitary chord gave promise of a time 
when octaves upon octaves of golden strings 
should be added to Hope’s poor lyre. The 
apparent wastefulness of life made Watts 
treasure the thought of death. When he 


heard of Matthew Arnold’s death he said, 
““ And people who are like chips in porridge 
go on living.” As Watts saw the final 
puzzle, the very incompleteness of life may 
be the surest argument for that other exis- 
tence. Life here, with its murmurs of, the 
mighty waters rolling evermore, cannot be all 
that man is intended to know; he must 
reach perfection and finality elsewhere. 


In the pictures treating of Death we come 





Compton Gallery 
DEATH, THE MESSENGER (StTupDy) 


r G. F. WATTS 





The Death Pictures 125 


most near to the full philosophy of the 
painter-poet. The Messenger, in the Man- 
chester Whitworth Institute and the Tate 
Gallery, pictures the Messenger of Death 
bringing rest after a life of strenuous toil 
and achievement. At the feet of the dying 
man in his orange-red robes are the mallet 
and palette of the arts, the book and the 
violin. The outworn man hears the call, 
and opening his eyes, he finds not the Death 
he expected, but a kindly Consoler, bearing 
in her arms a little child—the dying man’s 
real selfi—whom the Messenger will nurse into 
perfection in the fuller life beyond the grave. 

Even in the passing of a little child—the 
saddest form of death—Watts found a com- 
pensation. It was in July 1886 that Watts 
asked his second wife to marry him. He was 
sixty-nine and there was a momentary doubt 
as to what friends might think of the union 


between the master and his pupil. It was 


126 The Quality of the Artist 


agreed that, for a while, nothing should be 
said of the engagement, and the bride went 
to stay with her brother in Scotland. During 
the visit a little son of the house fell from 
his pony and after a month’s illness died. 
Mrs. Watts wrote to the painter telling him 
the story. He replied, “ I could hardly read 
your letter for very pity. I feel with you 
to have suffered a personal loss.”’ Being 
himself ill in bed, he asked for a pencil and 
drew a tiny sketch for the stricken mother. 
In a covering letter to Mrs. Watts, he de- 
scribed the sketch as the Angel of Death with 
a child in her lap, on whose head she is 
placing a circlet-—Death the Angel crowning 
Innocence. The finished picture, a colour 
symphony in the moss-greens of earth and the 
blues of night, was among those which Watts 
refused to sell. Choosing that the Silent Angel 
of Pity should comfort the many rather than 


the few, he gave it to the nation. 


“ Sic Transit” 127 


This was life unfulfilled. In the Sic 
Transit, Watts laid a chaplet upon the bier 
of one who passed away rich in honour and 
achievement. In the dim light of a death 
chamber lies one wrapped in a great shroud ; 
the laurel of victory and other tokens of 
glorious human life are near by; the helmet 
with its peacock’s plume, the lute, the 
jewelled cup and the book. On the canvas 


Watts wrote :— 


What I spent, I had. 
What I saved, I lost. 
What I gave, I have. 

It was the conception of Death, the friend, 
rather than Death, the foe, which Watts 
strove to impress upon the imagination of 
his fellow-men and, as the truth in its broadest 
aspect was the truth upon which Watts 
loved to dwell, he pictured the power of 
Death as impersonal. 

Very few have reached the philosophic 


128 The Quality of the Artist 


position of Epicurus who could say, ““Why 
should death concern me, since when it is 
I am not and when I am it is not.” But 
there is a richer and a deeper belief which ~ 
transcends the instinctive agony of the 
moment of parting. It is _ beautifully 
expressed in Bartholomé’s Monument to the 
Dead in Pére Lachaise, in which he carved 
the Angel of Immortality holding open the 
door of the symbolic tomb as she looks with 
kindly sympathy upon the sleeping forms 
at her feet—a man, a woman and their one 
year old child, united in life and not divided 


in death. The inscription is from Isaiah :-— 


“The people that walked in darkness have seen 
a great light; they that dwell in the land of the 
shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.” 


Technical criticism of such a work is out 
of place here, but this may be said. In no 


respect is the treatment realistic, nor, on the 


Watts the Seer 129 


contrary, is it classical, save in the post- 
ponement of physical to spiritual anguish. 
The Monument aux Morts is strikingly 
modern in execution, the naturalism in the 
modelling of the limbs being akin to the 
methods by which the sculptors of to-day 
are expressing their thought and feeling in 
other branches of the art. But the real 
beauty of the work lies in the absence of 
every suggestion of individualism. It is 
truly a “Monument Aux Morts’’—to the 
Mighty Dead,—and tells of an artist who 
might, or might not, have been stirred by 
the sufferings of an individual but who, 
at any rate, was inspired to a work of 
lasting worth by the common defeat or 
common victory in which we must all 
share. 

The difficulties which Watts faced and 
the difficulties which the artists of to-day 


must face are mental and spiritual as well as 


130 The Quality of the Artist 


material. Humanity has been caught in 
the undertow of a civilization which, with 
all its material excellences, is essentially non- 
spiritual. It is doubtful if the experience 
of a man or woman to-day is greater than 
it was a couple of centuries ago when folk 
were really familiar with the fields, woods 
and hills of their own district and really 
knew those who lived in their own village, 
and worshipped in their own parish church. 
The modern trouble is that, at once, we see 
too much and too little. In every direction 
we find it difficult to secure those sure, 
concrete visions of nature and humanity 
which have always been the best food for the 
imagination and the basis of the greatest art 
efforts. Living at a time not far removed 
from our own, Watts sought to establish a 
harmony between his countrymen and the 
All of Things, which is real knowledge. He 
did this without abandoning the tested 


Vision of Deity 131 


methods of his craft and without throwing 
aside the old-time faith. Though he may not 
claim full success, and though the problems 
he faced were not entirely our problems, there 
is comfort and inspiration in the conception 
of history and life which he evolved and 
which he expressed in an art based upon 
beauty and honest labour. His example 
assures us that painting can still catch 
from fleeting time the calm of blest 
eternity. Above all, his example gives 
assurance that from the shattering of the 
old beliefs, a more enlightened philosophy 
may arise. 

The All-pervading, painted about 1899 
or 1900, the picture of the brooding angel 
dominant over, and yet immanent in, the 
universe, symbolised by the sphere in its 
hands, was the seer’s final expression of his 
vision of deity. Mindful of the electrons 


which circle around the nucleus of the ninety- 


132 The Quality of the Artist 


two elemental atoms, the God of Watts was 
also mindful of Sirius, of Betelgeuse, and the 
myriad marvels of the Milky Way. Like 
many modern men and women, Watts could 
not see Creation as the work of the kindly, 
white-bearded patriarch of earlier imagina- 
tion. The Godhead must be regarded as 
immanent in the world and humanity, if 
Chaos, the Eve trilogy and the pictures 
of Love, Life and Death are to be understood. 
To Watts, Creation was a breath issuing from 
God which became matter. ‘“‘ If I were ever,” 
he said, ‘‘ to make a symbol of Deity it would © 
be as a great vesture into which everything 
that exists is woven.” Watts illustrated his 
idea of the conflict between force and 
gravitation by the shuttle which has to go 
backwards and forwards to create the web, an 
idea which coincided happily with his vision 
of all creation as the garment of God. 


Passing from time to eternity, he could 


Vision of Deity 133 


conceive of a state of happiness when human 
beings become one without loss of individual 
consciousness, just as a woven piece of linen 
is one, though composed of an_ infinite 
number of strands. 

It is because the faith of Watts was one 
which a deist of to-day can accept that we 
may affirm his essential popularity, in the 
sense that he offered his countrymen, what 
the best of them are always seeking—a clue 
to the riddle of existence. The artist who 
deliberately refuses to satisfy this craving 
may please for an hour; he may flourish for 
a decade ; but consciously or unconsciously, 
the truly great artist has always been 
obsessed with interests beyond those of an 
idle hour. Titian and Tintoretto; Michel- 
angelo, Raphael and Da Vinci; Rubens, 
Rembrandt, and Velasquez; Reynolds and 
Turner ; Alfred Stevens and Alfred Gilbert. 

Men of this kind have been the torch bearers 


134 The Quality of the Artist 


of humanity. Falling, each has flung his 
burning brand to the runner that followed, 
and because they expressed more than their 
individual moods, they are, or they will be, 
of the number the mass of the people will seek 
to understand. 

Why boggle over the word “ popular ’— 
of the people? Serving his public never 
troubled the craftsman of old; the person 
who is harmed is the professional gentleman 
of to-day. When Verrocchio sold his wares 
in Florence, he was willing to adapt himself 
to the communal mind. So was Phidias. 
Yet the professional painter or sculptor of 
to-day too often merely plays upon the whims 
of a section. It may be the section which 
asks him to dinner . it may be the claque 
which crowds the studio on Show Sunday. 
But working with a faith in the value of his 
message for the whole body of his country- 


men, the artist will find that many whom he 


Art and Revelation 135 


believed blind, can see. Speaking at Cam- 
bridge some years ago Sir Arthur Quiller 
Couch defined the relation between the artist 
and the ordinary man of the people thus: 
“As we dwell here between two mysteries of 
the soul within and an ordered universe 
without, so among us are granted to dwell 
certain men of more delicate intellectual 
fibre than their fellows ; men whose minds 
have as it were filaments to intercept, 
apprehend, conduct, translate home to us 
stray messages between these two mysteries.’ 
These men are the artist-seers and the purpose 
of their creation is revelation. Craft is the 
means by which they achieve their end, 
and without adequate craftsmanship they 
must fail. But those who have the needful 
powers of hand and mind may rightly 
desire that their revelation should be to the 
many and not to the few. Though there is 


no universal test of great art, there is none 


136 The Quality of the Artist 


more generally applicable than the test which 
Ferrier devised for philosophical truth— 


‘ For all and not for some.’ 


This may be said in conclusion. Though 
it would be difficult to rate the example of the 
poet-painter too highly, it is easy to overstate 
the case when determining the place of Watts 
among the great artists of allages. At times 
the hand of the painter distrusted its power 
to express the visions of the mind and heart. 


Not always did Watts’s designs reveal true 


pictorial invention, as in the remorseless 


movement of the robed figure of Death or the 
passionate abandon of the sorrowing Eve. 
In the man himself there was a certair 
humourlessness. He had not the sweet 
bloodedness, say of Burne-Jones, of whom it 
has been said that he was a man you were 
happy with. Watts aroused noble thoughts 


and the desire for high endeavour in those 


Art and Revelation 137 


with whom he came in contact, but not all the 
careless joy that is to be found in common 
things. We see his gentle spirit moving 
through the green shades of Limbo with 
Homer, with Heraclitus, and with Plato— 
one of them, but a listener always. Watts 
claimed kinship with the great poets ; he did 
not claim equality. He had not the insati- 
able curiosity which is a primary attribute 
of the world-genius. The fact that he was 
seldom at enmity with the world, entailed 
the loss of a certain intensity which arises 
from struggle and defeat, as, in even greater 
artists, it arises from struggle and triumph. 
For these reasons, the imagination of Watts 
seldom reached the impassioned glow which 
gives complete fusion between the material 
and the spiritual. Nor had he the sublime 
faith in his powers with which a great age 
can endow an artist. The serenity of 


Phidias, of Shakespeare, was not for Watts, 
i 


138 The Quality of the Artist 


perhaps because Watts sought consciously, | 
while they were unconscious. 

The value of the example of Watts is rather 
to be found in his belief in the artist as an 
instrument of God. Watts never forgot that 
he was working for men and women, each with 
animmortal soul. He judged he was painting 
the commonplace when he failed to reveal 
the one thing worthy of discovery. If the 
endowment of our painter had to be gathered 
into a phrase it would be that he had the 
divine gift of enthusiasm, enthusiasm which 


Emerson characterised as ‘the height of 
man, the passing from the human to 


the divine’’; enthusiasm which has been 
even more beautifully defined as “‘ God 
breaking into visibility through a human 
life:”’ 

Faith in a religious creed is not a necessary 
condition to the well-being of a great poet 


or painter, but faith in something is essential. 


Art and Revelation 139 


Harnessed to our work-a-day labours we feel 
the play of our muscles and the effort of the 
mind, though the totality of things is beyond 
our comprehension and only to be appre- 
hended by faith. Religion is one expression 
of the inner life which beats in harmony with 
the Creator; art is another. For those who 
would recreate the god-like mood in which 
the Creator endowed humanity with a 
measure of his own infinite powers, art and 
religion are one. The painter is content with 
the earthbound thing, in as much as his 
concern is with what men can handle and 
see, but he also seeks to reveal a God-given 
life; to display God-given energies. Art 
allows us to live with Phidias on the Acro- 
polis, with Fra Angelico in the shady 
cloisters of San Marco, or with Leonardo, in 
the bare council chamber of the Signorial 
Palace at Florence. Were it not for art 


most of us would pass into the shadowland 


I40 The Quality of the Artist 


without ever knowing the full endowments of 
the human mind and heart. 

Lacordaire once said ‘‘ God is not coming 
into your life at the tail of an argument.” 
Nor is art. Nevertheless the proposition 
with which this study commenced shall be 
justified. Art must again be recognised as 
the expression of the All of Human Experi- 
ence and this unity of the knowable will be 
restored to the world when art is granted 
once more its due place in social life. 
Rightly understood history is the story of the 
effort of the creative force to arrive at some- 
thing which is only realised in man, and even 
in man only imperfectly. When a sufficiency 
of simple food and clothing was secured, 
man made his first step towards a knowledge 
of this creative effort. A grave has been 
unearthed in the Dordogne Valley in which a 
Mousterian hunter was laid to rest. Heavy 


jawed, chinless, with snout-like nose and a 





Art and Revelation I4I 


marked ridge extending across his forehead 
from temple to temple, he had risen little 
higher than the beasts with whom he 
herded. Yet with the body were laid 
fragments of red ochre, offerings of food and 
well-fashioned flint tools for use in the spirit 
world. Already science and religion went 
hand in hand and together made art. Among 
the artists of our time to whom the same 
vision was vouchsafed, is the subject of this 
study. The sonnet, in which Swinburne 
summed up the best that his countrymen 
could say of George Frederic Watts, was no 


more than the artist’s due :— 


High thought and hallowed love, by faith made one, 
Begat and bare the sweet strong-hearted child, 
Art, nursed by Nature ; earth and sea and sun 

Saw Nature then more god-like as she smiled. 

Life smiled on Death, and Death on Life; the Soul 
Between them shone and soared above their strife 
And left on Time’s unclosed and starry scroll 

A sign that quickened death to deathless life. 


142 The Quality of the Artist 


Peace rose like Hope, a patient queen, and bade 

Hell’s first-born, Faith, abjure her creed and die ; 

And love, by life and death made sad and glad, 

Gave Conscience ease and watched Good Will pass 
by. 

All these make music now of one man’s name, 

Whose life and age are one with love and fame, 


APPENDIX I 


List oF PICTURES BY WATTS IN BRITISH GALLERIES 
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. 


LONDON: Royat ACADEMY (DIPLOMA GALLERY). 


“‘ My punishment is greater than I can bear.” 
The Death of Cain (1886). 

Lord Leighton (1890). 

Portrait of the Artist (1864). 


LONDON: NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY. 


683. Lord Lyndhurst. 
684. Lord Stratford de Redcliffe. 
685. Lord Lyons. 
895. Earl Russell. 
1000. Matthew Arnold. 
toor1. Robert Carlyle. 
1002. Thomas Carlyle. 
1003. Sir Andrew Clark (1894). 
1004. Sir Charles Hallé. 
1005. Lord Lawrence. 
too6. Sir A. Henry Layard. 
1007. Earl of Lytton (Owen Meredith). 
1008. Cardinal Manning (1882). 
toog. John Stuart Mill. 
toro. Sir Anthony Panizzi. 
torr. D.G. Rossetti (1865). 
1012. _ Earl of Shaftesbury (1882). 


143 


144 


1013. 
IOI4. 
IOI5. 
Io16. 
1049. 
1078. 
1126. 
1127. 
I251. 
1263. 
1324. 
1349. 
1350. 
1406. 
1542. 


Appendix 


Viscount Sherbrooke (1882). 
Sir Henry Taylor. 

Lord Tennyson. 

Thomas Wright. 

Lord Leighton (1881). 
William Morris (1880). 

W. E. Gladstone (1865). 

Sir John Grant. 

Dr. James Martineau (1874). 
8th Duke of Argyil. 

Dean Milman. 

Lord Salisbury (1884). 

W. E. Lecky (1878). 

G. F. Watts (unfinished). 

A. C. Swinburne. 

George, Marquess of Ripon (1895). 
Walter Crane (1891). 


LoNDON: NATIONAL GALLERY, MILLBANK. 


1561. 


1585. 
1630. 


1631. 
1632. 
1633. 
1634. 
1635. 
1636. 
1637. 
1638. 
1639. 
1640. 


Portrait of the Artist (1864). 

Psyche. f 

Mammon (Dedicated to his Worshippers) 
(1885). 

The Dweller in the Innermost. 

“For he had great possessions ’’ (1895). 

Dray Horses (1864). 

The Minotaur. 

Death Crowning Innocence. 

Jonah (1895). 

The Spirit of Christianity (1875). 

“Sic Transit Gloria Mundi ’’ (1892). 

Faith. 

Hope (1885). 


1641. 
1642. 


1643. 


1644. 


1645. 
1646. 


1647. 


1687. 


1692. 


1693. 
1894. 


1913. 
1920. 


1983. 
2682. 


Appendix 145 


Love and Life. 

*“ She shall be called Woman ”’ (1892). 

Eve Tempted. 

Eve Repentant. 

Love and Death. 

The Messenger. 

Chaos. 

The All Pervading. 

Love Triumphant (1900). 

Time, Death and Judgment. 

The Court of Death (Finished on his 86th 
Birthday). 

A Story from Boccaccio. 

Life’s Illusions. 

Echo (1843). 

Portrait of a Gentleman. 


On LOAN FROM THE COMPTON GALLERY. 


Bacchante. 

Farringford. 

Freshwater. 

Hon. A. Spring-Rice. 

In Asia Minor—Budrum. 
Jacob and Esau. 

Lady Garvagh. 

Lady Lilford. 

Loch Ness. 

Miss Mildmay. 
Moorland, Inverness-shire. 
Off Corsica. 

Portrait Study of a Girl. 
Sea Ghost, 


146 Appendix 


The Countess Somers. 

The Land of Weissnichtwo. 
Undine. 

Whence and Whither. 


Lonpon : NATIONAL GALLERY, TRAFALGAR SQUARE, 


1654. Right Hon. Russell Gurney. 
On Loan: Orpheus and Eurydice. 


LONDON: THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM 
(SouTH KENSINGTON). 


1. The Window Seat (1861). Ionides Collection. 
2. Daphne’s Bath. Ionides Collection. 
The Ionides Family (Ten Pictures). 
39. Thomas Carlyle (1868). Forster Collection. 
Portrait of A. Legros. 


Lonpon: St. PAuL’s CATHEDRAL, 


Time, Death and Judgment. 
Peace and Goodwill. 


BIRMINGHAM: MusEUM AND ART GALLERY. 


843. A Roman Lady. 
844. Little Red Riding Hood (1890). 


Bury: City ArT GALLERY. 
192. Portrait of Mr. Thomas Wrigley (1875). 


EDINBURGH : NATIONAL GALLERY OF SCOTLAND, 
932. Mischief (1878). 


GUILDFORD: 


= 


dis se salir UN a at de 


Appendix 


Study of a Donkey’s Head. 
The Mid-day Rest. 
Garibaldi. 

Gill. 

Dawn. 

Europa. 

Bacchanal. 

The Condottieri. 

Esau. 

Building of the Ark. 

Love Steering the Boat of Humanity. 
The Messenger of Peace. 
Peace and Goodwill. 
Orpheus and Eurydice. 

In Asia Minor. 

Lady Godiva. 

Watford Railway Bridge. 
J. S. Copley, Baron Lyndhurst. 
P. H. Calderon, R.A. 

His Late Majesty King Edward VII. 
Right Hon. Gerald Balfour. 
G. F. Watts, R.A., O.M. 
The Sisters. 

Miss Rachel Gurney. 

The Standard Bearer. 

A Sketch. 

The Earl of Shrewsbury. 
The Triumph of St. George. 
Iris. 

A Dedication. 

Orlando and the Witch. 
Britomart. 


147 


THE WatTTs GALLERY, COMPTON. 


Appendix 


The Sun, Earth, and her Dead Daughter, 
The Moon. 

Fiesole from Careggi. 

Eve. A Trilogy. 

Prince de Joinville. 

A Boy’s Head. 

A Copy (1831). 

Little Miss Hopkins (1836). 

Miss Marietta Lockhart (1846). 

The Wounded Heron. 

Blondel. 

Very Early Study. 

Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

The Drowning of the Doctor of Lorenzo dei 
Medici (1846). 

Peasant and Child. 

A Derbyshire Cottage. 

A Hawking Scene. 

A Study from Nature. 

Touchstone. 

The Song of the Shirt. 

Sympathy. 

Right Hon. John Burns, 

The Irish Famine. 

Found Drowned. 

Under a Dry Arch. 

John Stuart Mill. 

George Andrews. 

The Idle Child of Fancy. ; 

Mrs. Josephine Butler. 

Claude Goldsmid Montefiore, M.A. 

A Parasite. 

Seen from the Train. 

A Fair Saxon. 


Appendix 140, 


69. Chaos. 
7o. The First Oyster. 
71. Orpheus and Eurydice. 
972. Arcadia. 
73. Evolution. 
74. Lady Algernon Gordon-Lennox. 
75. Miss May Prinsep. 
76. The Prodigal Son. 
78. Lord Campbell. 
79. The Prodigal Son. 
80. Professor Flinders Petrie. 
81. Industry of Greed. 
82. Miss Wedderburn. 
83. Mrs. Langtry. 
84. The Magdalen at the Foot of the Cross. 
85. Right Hon. Charles Booth. 
86. Naples. 
87. The Wine Bearer. 
88. Aristides and the Shepherds. 
89. Study of a Child’s Head. 
go. A Study in Armour. 
o1. A Study from the Nude. 
92. A Study of a Helmet. 
93. Surrey Woodland. 
94. Ophelia. 
95. Sunset on the Alps. 
96. The Sower of the Systems. 
97. The End of the Day. 
98. Mother and Child. 
99. Eve Repentant. 
roo. Lucy. 
tor. Destiny. 
102. Eve Tempted. 


150 


103. 
104. 
105. 
107. 
108. 
109. 
I10. 
III. 
112. 
113. 
II4. 
15. 
116. 
37: 
118. 
119. 
120. 
I2r. 
122. 
123. 
124. 
125. 
126. 
127, 
128. 
120. 
130. 
131. 
132. 
133. 
134. 
135. 


Appendix 


Study for the Curse of Cain. 
Angel removing the Curse of Cain. 
Miss Mary Anderson. 

Uldra. 

The Sphinx. 

The Genius of Greek Poetry. 
Endymion. 

Olympus on Ida. 
Prometheus. 

The Nixies’ Foster Daughter. 
The Creation of Eve. 

The Denunciation of Adam and Eve. 
Paolo and Francesca. 

Love Triumphant. 

A Recording Angel. 

H. T. Prinsep. 

The Earth. 

The Court of Death. 

After the Deluge. 

The Slumber of the Ages. 
Outcast of Goodwill. 

The Spirit of Christianity. 
Study for Love and Life. 
Green Summer, 

Petraja, Near Florence. 
Progress. 

Lilian. 

Right Hon. William E. Gladstone. 
A Fugue. 

J. Joachim. 

Ganymede. 

Near Brighton, 


Appendix I5I 


IRELAND : THE NATIONAL GALLERY AND NATIONAL 
PORTRAIT GALLERY. 


279. Portrait Sketch of the Hon. Mrs. Norton. 


LEEDS: City ART GALLERY. 
295. Artemis. 


LEICESTER: City ART GALLERY. 


51. Orlando pursuing the Fata Morgana. 


LIVERPOOL: THE WALKER ART GALLERY. 


638. Naples. 
639. Cupid Asleep. 
640. Promises. 


MANCHESTER: City ART GALLERY. 


412. The Good Samaritan. 

413. Charles A. Rickards, Esq. 

414. Prayer. 

415. Paolo and Francesca. 

416. The Hon. John Lothrop Motley. 


MANCHESTER: THE WHITWORTH INSTITUTE. 


Love and Death (1877). 

Death Crowning Innocence (1890). 
Hope (1891). 

Out of the Storm. 

Message of Peace (1891). 

Time, Death and Judgment. 

Love and Life (1890). 


152 Appendix 


OxFORD: THE ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM. 
The Carrara Mountains. 


AUSTRALIA: ADELAIDE GALLERY. 
Lord Tennyson (1890) (In Peer’s Robes). 


AUSTRALIA: MELBOURNE NATIONAL GALLERY. 
Lord Tennyson (1857). 


SCULPTURE. 


NATIONAL GALLERY, MILLBANK, 
1768. Clytie (Bronze bust). 


KENSINGTON GARDENS, LONDON. 
Physical Energy (Bronze equestrian statue). 


LINCOLN CLOSE. 
Statue of Tennyson (1905). 


—_——__. —_ —_ 


APPENDIX II 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 
Mrs. M.S. Watts’s Annals ofan Artist’s Life; 2 vols., 
IgI2 
Volume III. : Watts’s Writings. 


(Macmillan.) 


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